Faux amis in speech and writing: a corpus-based study of English false friends in the production of Spanish students

Abstract

The crosslinguistic phenomenon of faux amis has been extensively studied in different fields of language research, such as translation (Granger and Swallow 1988, Venuti 2002, Malkiel 2006, Ruiz Mezcua 2008), lexicography (Hill 1982, Cuenca Villarejo 1987, Prado 2001, Postigo Pinazo, 2007), and second language acquisition research (Lengeling 1995, Frutos Martinez 2001, Wagner 2004, Chacon Beltran 2006). Faux amis (Koessler and Derocquigny 1928), also referred to as “false friends” (Zethsen 2004, Chacon Beltran 2006) or “deceptive cognates” (Lado 1957, Batchelor and Offord 2000) are words which share similar forms in two or more languages but have different meanings and/or uses in each language (e.g. English carpet ‘rug’ versus Spanish carpeta ‘folder’; English fabric ‘cloth’ versus French fabrique ‘factory’; German Gift ‘poison’ versus English gift ‘present’). Despite the wide range of surveys, there is a conspicuous scarcity of studies which apply a corpus-based methodology to the investigation of these words; and none of the existing corpus-based studies explore the presence of English false friends in spoken learner language (Granger 1996, Palacios Martinez and Alonso 2005). The present study aims at filling this void by examining 100 high-frequency English false friends in the spoken and written performance of Spanish learners of English through an analysis of two learner corpora, namely the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI). The data obtained from these corpora allow us to draw conclusions about the learners’ active use of these lexical items in speech and writing. A total amount of 1403 sample sentences have been closely examined. My analysis reveals that EFL learners make more errors with false friends in their written than in their spoken production and it also shows that certain English false friends are especially difficult for learners (e.g. actually, pretend, argument). Thus, the findings of this study certainly shed some light on students’ problems in this lexical area which should be addressed in an EFL context.1