Approaching secondary term formation through the analysis of multiword units

Abstract

Secondary term formation is a process of undeniable importance in modern specialised communication due to the dominance of English. However, empirical works and methodologies to approach this issue on specialised neology are scarce. This paper describes a contrastive study that proposes to tackle secondary term formation by addressing the most productive units in term formation in the dominant language, syntagmatic noun compounds. It describes and compares these multiword units in an English-Spanish comparable corpus containing research papers in the field of remote sensing. The compounds originating in the language of primary term formation are analysed first and then compared to the resulting units in the target language, with special attention paid to their morphosyntactic and semantic structure. Finally, the influence of English in the Spanish equivalents is assessed through the identification of the transferring procedures used to import them. The results show a strong preference for loan translations in this process.