Transfer Effects in Absolutely and Relatively Used Adjectives among Slovene Students of English

Abstract

The article analyses transfer effects between Slovene and English with regard to the little researched area of absolute and relative uses of adjectives. The practical test of the extent to which Slovene students of English (levels C1 and C2) exhibit (negative) transfer of linguistic strategies between the two languages builds on a theoretical account of adjectival use that distinguishes between the subsystems of standard (internal, external) and degree (base, median, high). The results show that in translating from Slovene into English, the great majority of the students tested retain absolute comparatives, even though they are much less common in English. On the other hand, a significant proportion of students also keep absolute superlatives when translating into their mother tongue, even though this is a productive strategy in English and only rarely used in Slovene.