A Comparative Analysis of the Verb + Noun Collocations and Other Constructions in Spanish and Croatian

Abstract

This paper contrasts a type of possible collocations in Spanish with its translation into Croatian, seeing how the two languages express the same content. We analyze the collocations of the verb + noun structure with the five of most frequent verbs in this type of construction (Koike 2001). The candidate collocations were first obtained from a monolingual corpus (esTenTen18), after which their search was continued in a parallel Spanish-Croatian corpus (Mikelenić and Tadić 2020). The analysis offers a preliminary approach to the differences that exist between the two languages according to the formal and lexical-semantic criteria in order to promote future studies of this type, since a shortage of similar works has been noted. The Spanish verb + noun collocations with the five most frequent verbs that form this type of construction are translated into Croatian in four ways, listed in order of frequency in the corpus: with a single verb, with an equivalent structure, where the basic verb can be the same or different from Spanish and applying a reformulation.