Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte
ICLC 7 - UCCTS 3
Book of Abstracts
July 11-13, 2013
Table of Contents
Plenary Papers ................................................................................................................... 1
Session Papers .................................................................................................................. 15
iii
Plenary Papers
1
Gast, Volker:
On the Use of Translation Corpora in Contrastive Linguistics
The growing infrastructure of multilingual corpus resources has opened up new
possibilities for empirical research in contrastive linguistics (cf. Schmied 2008 for an
overview). A canon of methods for the systematic exploitation of these possibilities (as
has been developed for monolingual corpus studies in the past decade) is not yet available,
however. In this talk, I will make some suggestions for possible corpus-based research
designs in contrastive linguistics. I will argue that contrastive corpus linguistics should go
beyond the observation of (quantitative) contrasts in the corpora investigated. Specifically,
I will make a case for a hypothesis-driven research design, and for the building of
statistical models which allow us to make predictions about the lexical or grammatical
choices found in a translation corpus.
I will present two case studies, both of which are based on English and German data from
the Europarl corpus (Koehn 2005, Cartoni & Meyer 2012), one on impersonal pronouns
and one dealing with wh-clefts. In using the term ‘impersonal pronoun’ I refer to pronouns
like German man in (1) and its English counterparts in (2) (cf. van der Auwera et al. 2012,
Gast & van der Auwera 2013):
(1) Man lebt nur einmal.
(2) You/one only live(s) once.
While the German pronoun man has a very general semantics and consequently a broad
distribution, English does not have any such pronoun and uses a variety of expressions or
strategies instead – sometimes one and you as in (2), but often also other strategies like the
third person plural pronoun they or a passive form of the verb (cf. Siewierska 2010). The
question arises to what extent we can predict the specific ‘impersonalization strategy’
corresponding to a given occurrence of man in the German corpus part. I will aim to
answer this question by fitting a logistic regression model which uses properties of
German sentences containing man to predict the type of expression found in the
corresponding English sentence.
The second case study that I will present concerns the use of wh-clefts in English and their
German counterparts (cf. Gast & Wiechmann 2012, Gast & Levshina forthcoming):
(3) What I need is a beer.
(4) Was ich brauche ist ein Bier.
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The use or non-use of wh-clefts is regarded as the outcome of an (informally presented)
‘cost-benefit analysis’. W(h)-clefts are assumed to provide specific benefits and to come
with specific costs. Their differential distribution in English and German – English whclefts are approximately four times more frequent than German w-clefts in the Europarl
corpus – is primarily regarded as following not from differences in the structure or
function of w(h)-clefts themselves, but from the different sets of alternative structures
available in English and German. Broadly speaking, German can often achieve the
benefits provided by an English wh-cleft without resorting to a w-cleft, e.g. because
(canonical) verb-second ordering allows for more flexibility than SVO-order, thus satisfying specific information-structural needs for which wh-clefts are required in English. As
in the case of impersonal pronouns, this approach allows us to make predictions about the
type of structure found in one part of the corpus (English or German) under specific
conditions observed in the other corpus part.
References
Cartoni, B. & T. Meyer (2012). Extracting directional and comparable corpora from a
multilingual corpus for translation studies. In Proceedings of the 8th International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Istanbul.
Gast, V. and J. van der Auwera (2013). Towards a distributional typology of human
impersonal pronouns, based on data from European languages. In Bakker, D. & M.
Haspelmath (eds), Languages Across Boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska,
119–158. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Gast, V. & N. Levshina (forthcoming). Motivating w(h)-clefts in English and German: A
hypothesis-driven parallel corpus study. In De Cesare, Anna-Maria (ed.), Frequency,
Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and Germanic. Contrastive,
Corpus-Based Studies. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Gast, V. & D. Wiechmann (2012). W(h)-Clefts im Deutschen und Englischen. Eine
quantitative Untersuchung auf Grundlage des Europarl-Korpus'. In Gunkel, L. & G.
Zifonun (eds.), Jahrbuch des IDS 2011, 333–362. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Koehn, P. (2005). Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. Phuket:
MT Summit X.
Schmied, J. (2008). Contrastive corpus studies. In Lüdeling, Anke and Merja Kytö (eds),
Corpus Linguistics – An International Handbook. Vol. 2, 1140–1159. Berlin, New York:
de Gruyter Mouton.
4
Siewierska, A. (2010). From 3pl to passive: incipient, emergent and established passives.
Diachronica 27: 73–109.
van der Auwera, J., V. Gast & J. Vanderbiesen (2012). Human impersonal pronouns in
English, Dutch and German. Leuvense Bijdragen 98.1: 27–64. (Special issue on ‘A
Germanic Sandwich’, ed. E. Ruigendijk.)
5
Giannoulopoulou, Giannoula:
Contrastive Morphology: Why Isn’t It More Predictable?
The aim of this talk is to discuss issues of contrastive morphology, combining the points
of view of morphological theory and contrastive linguistics using examples from Modern
Greek and Italian.
These languages are both fusional as far as morphological typology is concerned, and they
are SVO (although Modern Greek is considered both SVO and VSO by some
researchers). Whereas the processes involved in inflection and derivation in Modern
Greek and Italian are remarkably similar, compounding shows more differences than
similarities: it is much more productive in Modern Greek than in Italian, it involves
mostly stems in Modern Greek but words in Italian, and it requires the linking vowel -oin Modern Greek but no linking vowel in Italian.
One possible reason for these divergences could be the richer inflectional system of
Modern Greek. Syntax – or more precisely the way syntax feeds into the lexicon – is also
likely to play a central role given that compounding is the morphological process closest
to syntax. The time-depth of compounding could also be a decisive factor, since Greek
compounding is already in evidence in Homeric texts while in Italian it is much more
recent. Thus, the main theoretical questions are:
*Can we compare morphology in different languages without comparing their
syntactic structures?
*Can the historical dimension be fruitful in comparing synchronic processes?
*What do we contrast when we contrast morphological phenomena?
*Is this difficulty in defining the limits of contrastive morphology linked to the
relative neglect of morphology in contrastive studies?
While the history of Contrastive Linguistics has shown a pattern of "success-declinesuccess” (Granger, 2003: 17), contrastive morphology has never drawn much attention
from researchers at any given time (cf. Hüning, 2009: 183, and Gast, 2008: 269 as far as
the contrastive analysis of English and German is concerned). Nor is morphology one of
those “elusive" aspects of language which (according to Ringbom 1994: 738) contrastive
analysis has tended to avoid. If anything, morphology is the one linguistic domain where
the interdependence of grammar and lexis is most clearly in evidence.
By focusing on the contrastive analysis of morphological phenomena in Modern Greek
and Italian, I will try to prove that contrastive morphology can be more predictable if it (a)
takes into consideration the whole of linguistic structure, especially syntax, and (b) adds
6
the historical dimension to the examination of synchronic data. Once contrastive
morphology moves into this direction, it will make a significant contribution to the
"potential for further fruitful interaction and cooperation between typology and
C[ontrastive] A[nalysis]” (König 2012: 13).
References
Gast, V. 2008. “Verb-noun compounds in English and German”. ZAA 56.3, 269-282.
Granger, S. 2003. “The corpus approach: a common way forward for Contrastive
Linguistics and Translation Studies?”. In S. Granger, J. Lerot & S. Petch-Tyson (eds.)
Corpus-based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies.
Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 17-29.
Hüning, M. 2009. “Semantic niches and analogy in word formation. Evidence from
contrastive linguistics”. Languages in Contrast 9(2): 183-201.
König, Ekkehard (2012): "Comparative linguistics and language comparison." In:
Languages in Contrast 12, 3-26.
Ringbom, H. 1994. “Contrastive analysis”. In R.E. Asher & J.M.Y. Simpson (eds).
Encyclopedia of Linguistics, vol. 2, 737-742. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
7
Granger, Sylviane:
Tracking the third code: A crosslinguistic corpus-driven approach to discourse markers
As demonstrated by a wide range of corpus-based crosslinguistic studies, translated
language has its own distinctive features which set it apart from both source and target
texts. These features are often referred to as ‘translationese’ but as the term tends to have
negative undertones, I prefer to use Frawley’s non-evaluative term of ‘third code’
(Frawley 1984).
The third code has been a major focus of interest in both contrastive linguistics and
translation studies. In the first part of my presentation I will give a brief outline of the
objectives and methods used in the two fields, pointing to both similarities and differences
in their respective approach to the third code. I will also highlight some of the benefits to
be gained from a rapprochement with the related field of learner corpus research which
makes extensive use of corpus-driven quantitative methods. In particular, I will show that
the “integrated contrastive model” (Granger 1996) coupled with Jarvis’s (2000) rigorous
methodological framework for the study of transfer can help tackle one of the main
difficulties in cross-linguistic studies, that of teasing apart translation universals from
source text effects.
The methodological principles set out in the first part of the presentation will be applied to
the analysis of discourse markers, a term used here to refer broadly to all linguistic items
that have a metadiscursive function, i.e. that do not add propositional material but help
readers organize, classify, interpret, evaluate, and react to such material (Vande Kopple
1985). The study is based on two 1-million word corpora: a corpus of original English
texts (OE) and a corpus of English translations of French texts (TE_FR). Both were
extracted from a version of the Europarl corpus which clearly identifies the source vs.
target status of the two languages (Cartoni et al 2011, Cartoni & Meyer 2012)1. Rather
than use a pre-established list of discourse markers, I have opted for a corpus-driven
method (Tognini-Bonelli 2000) to identify all the discourse markers that qualify as
‘lexical bundles’, i.e. highly frequent recurring sequences of words in a register (Biber et
al 1999: ch. 13). As shown by Biber et al (2004) lexical bundles fall into three main
categories: (1) referential bundles which make direct reference to physical or abstract
entities (the developing world, the United Kingdom); (2) discourse organizers which
reflect relationships between prior and coming discourse (with this in mind, in spite of the
fact that); and (3) stance bundles which express attitude or assessment of certainty (it is
possible that, one would hope that). My study focuses on the last two categories only.
1
8
I would like to express my gratitude to Bruno Cartoni for giving me access to this version of the corpus.
The extraction method consists of two stages: first, all lexical bundles of 3 to 4 words are
extracted with the WordList function in WordSmith Tools (Scott 2008); the Keywords
function is subsequently used to compare the two lists and identify the bundles that are
significantly over- or underused in TE_FR. This method proves to be a powerful heuristic
for identifying potential features of the third code. I will provide illustrations of both
under- and overused markers but will focus more particularly on four sets of items that are
significantly overused in translated French: markers of contrast (on the contrary, on the
one hand, on the other hand), topicalizers (as regards, with regard to, as far as x is
concerned, as for), stance markers (in fact, in actual fact, in point of fact, in reality, in
truth) and let us imperatives which can have a range of discourse functions. To facilitate
the interpretation of the data in terms of translation universals vs. source text effects, I will
make use of three other corpora: a corpus containing the French source texts of the
TE_FR corpus, a corpus of English translations of Dutch texts (TE_DU) and the Dutch
source texts.
In my conclusion I will sum up the advantages of a multi-corpus approach to the third
code and highlight some of its benefits for foreign language teaching, translator training
and bilingual lexicography.
References
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar
of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.
Biber, D., Conrad, S. & Cortes, V. (2004). If you look at … Lexical bundles in university
lectures and textbooks. Applied Linguistics 25, 2004, 371–405.
Cartoni, B. & Meyer, T. (2012). Extracting Directional and Comparable Corpora from a
Multilingual Corpus for Translation Studies. In Proceedings of the eighth international
conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Istanbul, 21-27 May 2012.
Cartoni, B., Zufferey, S., Meyer, T. & Popescu-Belis, A. (2011). How Comparable are
Parallel Corpora? Measuring the Distribution of General Vocabulary and Connectives. In
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora, 49th
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Portland, Oregon, 24
June 2011, 78–86.
Frawley, W. (1984). Prolegomenon to a theory of translation. In Frawley, W. (ed.)
Translation: Literary, Linguistic, and Philosophical Perspectives. Newark: University of
9
Delaware Press, 159-175. [Reprinted in Venuti, L. (ed.) (2000). The Translation Studies
Reader. London & New York: Routledge, 250-263].
Granger S. (1996) From CA to CIA and back: An integrated approach to computerized
bilingual and learner corpora. In Aijmer K., Altenberg B. and Johansson M. (eds.),
Languages in Contrast. Text-based cross-linguistic studies. Lund Studies in English 88.
Lund: Lund U.P., 37-51. (http://sites.uclouvain.be/cecl/archives/Granger_1996_from_CA
_to_CIA.pdf)
Jarvis, S. (2000). Methodological rigor in the study of transfer: identifying L1 influence in
the interlanguage lexicon. Language Learning 50(2): 245-309.
Scott, M. (2008). WordSmith Tools version 5. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
Tognini-Bonelli E. (2000). Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam & Philadelphia:
Benjamins.
Vande Kopple, W.J. (1985). Exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College
Composition and Communication 36, 1, 82-93.
10
Halverson, Sandra L.:
The Status of Contrastive Data in Translation Studies
Contrastive data has been put to varying uses within Translation Studies (= TS) for a very
long time. In early work, contrastive data was often used to investigate what options a
translator has (or does not have) and thus identify sites of interest for the investigation of
translator decision making (e.g.Catford 1967); or such data was used in the service of
translation pedagogy (e.g. Vinay and Darbelnet 1958). The introduction of contrastive
corpus data enabled the investigation of more subtle quantitative characteristics such as
frequency differences or variation across discourse contexts or text types (cp. Barlow
2011:7-8). The same period saw a shift of interest from more structural comparisons of
language systems to the study of situated texts (cp. Teich 1999) and relationships between
variation and context.
In TS today, contrastive data often informs studies of the characteristics of translated
language, also known as ‘translation universals’ research. Some of the latest work in this
area investigates the concurrent effects of either discourse or text type characteristics and
a potential ‘universal’ (Kruger and van Rooy 2012, Bernardini and Ferraresi 2011,
Delaere et al 2012, de Sutter et al 2012) or the concurrent and possibly opposing effects of
several universals (Hansen 2003, Teich 2003). As more complex results emerge, the need
for explanatory hypotheses becomes increasingly urgent.
At present, there are essentially two alternative (though not necessarily mutually
exclusive) sets of proposals regarding potential causes of the patterns in question. One set
of proposals is based on systemic functional linguistics and situates causes in the social
realm (e.g.Hansen 2003, Steiner 2001, Teich 1999, 2003). The other set chooses to situate
causes for some of these effects within the cognitive realm, as in Alves and Gonçalves
(2003, 2007) or Halverson (2003, 2010a). Attempts to bridge the two are also beginning
to appear (Alves et al 2010).
It would seem that developments within TS necessitate a careful look at the relationship
between the social and the cognitive realms in order that we might better hypothesize and
test for the causes of translational effects. This effort must be integrally linked to
assessments regarding the status of data types in empirical investigations. Problems arise
in the attempt to integrate the cognitive realm for our purposes, as current understandings
of bi- and multilingual cognition raise quite pressing questions about the use of corpus
data in general and about the status of monolingual corpora in particular (see also
Halverson 2010b). These questions will be discussed, as will their implications for the use
of contrastive data and methods in TS.
11
References
Alves, Fabio and José Luiz Gonçalves. 2007. Modelling translator’s competence.
Relevance and expertise under scrutiny. In Yves Gamvier, Miriam Shlesinger and
Radegundis Stolze (eds), Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies: Selected
Contributions from the EST Congress, Lisbon 2004. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 41-55.
Alves, Fabio and José Luiz Gonçalves. 2003. A relevance theory approach to the
investigation of inferential processes in translation. In Fabio Alved (ed), Triangulating
translation: perspectives in process oriented research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1134.
Alves, Fabio, Adriana Pagano, Stella Neumann, Erich Steiner and Silvia Hansen-Schirra.
2010. Translation units and grammatical shifts: towards an integration of product- and
process-based translation research. In Gregory Shreve and Erik Angelone (eds),
Translation and Cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 109-142.
Barlow, Michael. 2011. Corpus linguistics and theoretical inguistics. International
Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16:1, 3-44.
Bernardini, Siliva and Adriano Ferraresi. 2011. Practice, Description and Theory Come
Together – Normalization or Interference in Italian Technical Translation?
Meta 56:2, 226-246.
Catford, J.C. 1967. A linguistic theory of translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Delaere, Isabelle, Gert de Sutter and Koen Plevoets. 2012. Is translated language more
standardized than non-translated language? Using profile-based correspondence analysis
for measuring linguistic distances between language varieties. Target 24:2, 203-224.
De Sutter, Gert, Isabelle Deleare and Koen Plevoets. 2012. Lexical lectometry in corpusbased translation studies. Combining profile-based correspondence analysis and logistic
regression modeling. In Michael Oakes and Ming Ji (eds), Quantitative methods in
corpus-based translation studies. A practical guide to descriptive translation research.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 325-356.
Halverson, Sandra. 2010a. Cognitive translation studies: developments in theory and
method. In: Translation and cognition. Gregory Shreve and Erik Angelone (eds),
Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 349-369.
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Halverson, Sandra. 2010b. Translation universals or cross-linguistic influence: conceptual
and methodological issues. Paper presented at 6th EST Conference. Leuven, 23-25
September 2010.
Halverson, Sandra. 2003. The cognitive basis of translation universals. Target 15:2, 197241.
Hansen, Silvia. 2003. The nature of translated text. Saarbrücken: Saarland University.
Kruger, Haidee and Bertus van Rooy. 2012. Register and the features of translated
language. Across Languages and Cultures 13 (1), pp. 33–65 (2012)
Teich, Elke. 2003. Cross-Linguistic variation in system and text. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Teich, Elke. 1999. System-oriented and text-oriented comparative linguistic research.
Cross-linguistic variation in translation. Languages in Contrast 2:2, 187-210.
Steiner, Erich. 2001. Translations English-German: investigating the relative importance
of systemic contrasts and of the text-type “translation”. SPRIK reports. No. 7. University
of Oslo.
Vinay Jean-Paul and Jean Darbelnet. 1958/1995. Comparative Stylistics of French and
English: A methodology for translation.[translated and edited by Juan C. Sager & MarieJosée Hamel]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
13
Mauranen, Anna:
Translational corpora: better in search for the general or the specific?
Translational corpora are of two main kinds: parallel (contrastive) and comparable.
This talk discusses the major types in view of the kinds of results they can yield, with
examples from the Corpus of Translated Finnish (CTF), which is a comparable corpus of
translated and spontaneous texts in the same language, and the Finnish-English
Contrastive Corpus (FECCS), which consists of texts and their translations. It will be
argued that the corpora answer rather different questions; even though corpora generally
tend to be inclined towards quantitative views, it would seem that the main strength of
contrastive corpora are in the details, while comparable corpora shine in uncovering the
big picture. Both corpus types can reveal interesting things that advance the quest for
translation universals. Comparable corpora also render insights that relate translational
phenomena to other kinds of language contact, thus contributing to an even bigger picture
of what is at stake when we process more than one language simultaneously.
14
Session Papers
15
Arús-Hita, Jorge:
Thematic Annotation and the Textual-Interpersonal Interplay: a Cross-Linguistic
Perspective
The cross-linguistic analysis of the linguistic category Theme sheds a lot of light on the
interrelation existing among the different metafunctions, notably the interpersonal and the
textual. This paper deals with the results of research carried out within the CONTRANOT
(CONTrastive ANnOTation of English and Spanish texts) and MULTINOT
(MULTIdimensional anNOTation) projects, concerning Theme annotation (see Lavid
2008). Among the issues where textual considerations go hand in hand with interpersonal
ones, the following stand out: a) The Spanish Subject is often left unexpressed (e.g.
cerraron pronto (‘[they] closed up early’); is there therefore an unexpressed Theme, or is
the clause-initial Process the Theme? b) If elided Subjects are considered unrealized
Themes, how are Process ^ Subject structures to be analyzed (e.g. cayeron unas gotas al
mediodía (lit. ‘fell some [rain]drops at midday’)? Is the Process the ideational Theme, or
should also the post-verbal Subject be included within the Theme? Recent research briefly
summarized here – namely, Lavid, Arús and Zamorano (2010) and Arús, Lavid and
Moratón (2010) – has addressed the issues in a) and b), but other problematic points have
since arisen which the present paper tackles, e.g. c) the Subject is typically thematized in
English statements, whereas yes/no questions have Finite ^ Subject as Theme (see
Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 76); since this functional distinction is not reflected on
the interpersonal structure of Spanish (e.g. Han cerrado (‘[they] have closed up’) vs. ¿Han
cerrado? (‘Have [they] closed?’), what role does the Mood structure play in Spanish? And
hence, d) does the interpersonal structure have a function in Spanish or does it just serve
for textual waves to ride on them? (Cf. Matthiessen 1992: 44 for English) and e) if the
latter is the case, how is interpersonal meaning realized in Spanish?
References
Halliday, M.A.K and Christian Matthiessen (2004). An Introduction to Functional
Grammar, 3rd ed. London: Arnold.
Lavid, J. (2008) CONTRASTES: An online English-Spanish textual database for
contrastive and translation learning. In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.), Corpus
Linguistics, Computer Tools, and Applications –State of the Art. Frankfurt: Peter Lang
Verlag.
Lavid, Julia, Jorge Arús and Juan Rafael Zamorano (2010). Systemic Functional Grammar
of Spanish. A contrastive Study with English. Arús, Jorge, Julia Lavid and Lara Moratón
17
(2010). "Annotating thematic features in English and Spanish: A contrastive corpus-based
study". Paper presented at ICLC6, Berlin, Sep. 30-Oct. 2.
Matthiessen, Christian (1992). "Interpreting the textual metafunction", in Martin Davies
and Louis Ravelli, eds. Advances in Systemic Linguistics. Recent Theory and Practice.
London and New York: Pinter. 37-81.
18
Bekaert, Elisa / Enghels, Renata
The Syntax and Semantics of Perception Nominalizations: a Comparative Analysis
Spanish/French
Deverbal nominalizations have been defined as reclassifications of the corresponding
clauses, and it has been argued that there exists a systematic correlation between
nominalizations and their arguments on the one hand, and between clauses and their
verbal heads on the other hand (Hopper/Thompson 1985, Givón 2001, Heyvaert 2003,
Melloni 2007). However, these claims are based on the behavior of prototypical instances,
namely “nomina actionis” with an agentive subject. More recently analyses of other types
such as state nominalizations (Fábregas/Marín 2012) and nominalizations with an
experiencer subject (Meinschaefer 2003, Giammatteo/Albano/Ghio 2005, Fábregas/
Marín/McNally 2012) have given rise to more balanced descriptions. However, one
category remains poorly studied, namely nominalizations of perception, as opposed to the
large bibliography dedicated to the verbal category they derive from.
The semantic productivity of verbs of perception is due to different oppositions within the
field, corresponding to (1) the five perception modalities and their internal hierarchy
(Viberg 1984), (2) voluntary (look, listen) vs. involuntary perception (see, hear) and (3)
direct (I see him leave) vs. indirect perception (I see that you’re right). It has been shown
that these cognitive-semantic distinctions influence the syntactic behaviour of the
corresponding verbs and especially their complementing pattern (cf. Sweetser 1990,
Ibarretxe-Antuñano 1999, Enghels 2007 among others).
In this presentation we would like to examine to what extent the above-mentioned
cognitive-semantic oppositions are meaningful for the field of perception nominalizations,
and how the polysemy of these nominals reflects on their syntactic behavior in two
Romance languages, namely Spanish and French. More particularly we will focus on their
argument structure (Grimshaw 1990, Picallo 2003, Gisborne 2003) and its formal
realization (Bosque 2002). Based on an extensive corpus of 1600 examples (selected from
CREA and Frantext) we will compare the semantic and syntactic behavior of the
following cognate nouns: visión/ vision [‘sight’], audición/audition [‘hearing’],
mirada/regard [‘look’] and escucha/écoute [‘listening’]. We will show that both
suffixation and the semantics of the base verb play an important part in the linguistic
behavior of perception nominals.
References
ATILF: Base textuelle FRANTEXT [online], http://www.frantext.fr
19
Real Academia Española: Banco de datos (CREA) [online]: Corpus de referencia del
español actual, http://www.rae.es
Bekaert, Elisa / Enghels, Renata (in preparation): "Nominalizations of Spanish Perception
Verbs at the Syntax-Semantics Interface: a Contrastive Study of visión, vista, mirada,
audición, oído and escucha.
Bosque, Ignacio (2002): Las categorías gramaticales. Relaciones y diferencias. Madrid:
Sintesis.
Enghels, Renata (2007): Les modalités de perception visuelle et auditive: différences
conceptuelles et répercussions sémantico-syntaxiques en espagnol et en français.
Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Fábregas, Antonio / Rafael Marín (2012): “The Role of Aktionsart in Deverbal Nouns:
State Nominalizations across Languages.” In: Journal of Linguistics 48, 35-70.
Fábregas, Antonio / Marín, Rafael / Louise McNally (2012): “From Psych Verbs to
Nouns.” In: Violeta Demonte and Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, Change and State: a
Cross-Categorical View of Event Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Giammatteo, Mabel / Albano, Hilda / Adalberto Ghio (2005): “Clases de predicados y
nominalización.” In: Juan Cuartero Otal / Gerd Wotjak (eds.): Algunos problemas
específicos de la descripción sintáctico-semántica. Berlin: Frank und Timme, 35-48.
Gisborne, Nicolas (1993): "Nominalizations of Perception Verbs." In: UCL Working
Papers in Linguistics 5, 23-44.
Givón, Talmy (2001): Syntax: an Introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Grimshaw, Jane (1990): Argument Structure. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.
Heyvaert, Liesbet (2003): A Cognitive-Functional Approach to Nominalization in English.
Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hopper, Paul J. / Sandra A. Thompson (1985): "The Iconicity of the Universal Categories
‘Noun’ and ‘Verb’.” In: John Haiman (ed.): Iconicity in syntax. Amsterdam: Benjamins,
151-183.
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Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. (1999): Polysemy and Metaphor in Perception Verbs: a CrossLinguistic Study. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.
Meinschaefer, Judith (2003): "Nominalizations of French psychological verbs." In: Josep
Quer / Jan Schroten / Mauro Scorretti / Petra Sleeman / Els Verheugd (eds.): Selected
Papers from Going Romance. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 231-246.
Melloni, Chiara (2007): Polysemy in Word-Formation: the Case of Deverbal Nominals.
PhD thesis, University of Verona.
Picallo, M.C. (1999): "La estructura del sintagma nominal: las nominalizaciones y otros
sustantivos con complementos argumentales." In: I. Bosque / V. Demonte (eds.),
Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española. Madrid: Espasa, 363-393.
Sweetser, Eve (1990): From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural
Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: CUP.
Viberg, Åke. (1984): "The Verbs of Perception: a Typological Study." In: B. Butterworth
(ed.), Explanations for Language Universals. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 123-162.
21
Bernad, María / Rodríguez-Inés, Patricia / Kozlova, Inna
Translating Russian Affixes into Spanish: an Area of Special Difficulty
The use of affixes is an area of special difficulty when learning Russian as a foreign
language and when translating from it into other languages such as Spanish. Some
important and traditional works such as El Ruso: Gramática Práctica (L. Pulkina, E.
Zakhava-Nekrasova, 1997) and Handbook of Russian Affixes (P. Cubberley, 1994) devote
many pages to explaining affixes in Russian. While these elements are able to express
modality, movement, time, etc. in Russian, Spanish affixes are more limited in number
and function, which necessarily calls for creative translation strategies to get the meaning
through. Although not very numerous, there exist contrastive studies of originals and
translations focused on the use of affixes, such as Crossing the Frontiers of Linguistic
Typology: Lexical Differences and Translation Patterns in English and Russian Lolita by
Vladimir Nobokov (Lukasz Grabowski, 2011) and Such a Tiny Little Thing: Diminutive
Meanings in Alice In Wonderland as a Comparative Translation Study of English, Polish,
Russian and Czech (Dorota Lockyer, 2012). We have also worked in this line comparing
Anton Chehov’s Степь (Step’) and its translation into Spanish by Gallego (El Barranco,
1988 Pushkin Award to translated Russian literature) to analyse how the translator deals
with diminutive affixes.
However, analysing translation as a product may not be sufficient to fully understand the
translator’s decisions, which is the reason why we decided to interview three professional
translators. They were asked to evaluate the degree of acceptability of the decisions made
by Gallego related to diminutives from their own perspective and to propose their own
solution in each
case. They were also asked to put themselves in Gallego’s boots and comment on the
decisions he had taken. The results of this small-scale study and our will to take research
into the translation of Russian affixes further have established the basis for our PhD
project, which will be presented briefly. Against the backdrop of contrastive linguistics
and corpus linguistics, a study is currently being designed at the Faculty of Translation
and Interpreting in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in order to observe how native
Spanish translation trainees in the last two years of their training deal with the translation
of Russian affixes. After the experiment, questionnaires will be administered in order to
know about their problem and solution identification abilities. In addition, an electronic
corpus of student translations will be built, marked for employed translation strategies,
acceptability of results, and analysed in order to derive a didactic proposal for improving
learning to translate affixes from Russian into Spanish. The analysis will be both
qualitative and quantitative.
22
Bisiada, Mario
Diachronic Change in Causal Cohesive Devices in Translated and Non-Translated
German Business Articles
Syntactic contrasts in the information structure of English and German have been assumed
to have an effect on syntactic conventions in German in language contact situations such
as translation (House 2011), but the influence of translation on language change is still
largely ignored in accounts of language change. One of the first diachronic corpus studies
in this field was the Covert Translation project, which found, among other things, a trend
from hypotaxis to parataxis in concessive clause complexes in translated German popular
science articles (Becher 2011).
However, existing research has not yet covered a sufficiently large number of genres to be
able to make generalisations about German as a whole. In this paper, I will present some
findings from my PhD research, in which I replicate the research method of the Covert
Translation project to investigate whether a trend from hypotaxis to parataxis can be
found in causal clause complexes in translated and non-translated German business
articles.
The study applies a two-step diachronic corpus method on a one million word corpus of
business articles that I have compiled for my PhD project. The corpus consists of English
originals taken from the Harvard Business Review and German translations and nontranslations taken from its German edition, the Harvard Business Manager. In the first
step, translations from 1982-3 were compared with translations from 2008 to determine
diachronic changes in causal clause complexes. The four causal conjunctions because, as,
since and for were searched for to find out whether the corresponding German translations
are hypotactic or paratactic. Secondly, the comparable corpus of non-translations was
analysed for similar trends between 1982-3 and 2008 by searching for clause complexes
containing the causal conjunctions found to be used in the translation corpus.
Though a trend from hypotaxis to parataxis in causal clause complexes in the corpus can
be observed, hypotaxis is still the preferred choice. While in the 1980s, the conjunction
weil was used in the majority of cases, translators now increasingly use da and denn as
well as diverse, context-bound cohesive devices at the expense of weil. The trend away
from hypotaxis in the translations is thus driven mainly by a shift in popularity of certain
cohesive devices during the time span of this corpus. To investigate this shift, a small
survey of some of the translators involved in the 2008 translations has been conducted. It
shows that they consider weil to be less formal than other conjunctions, and sometimes try
to avoid causal clauses altogether.
23
The paper contributes to the field in two ways. First, it adds to the existing knowledge of
language change through language contact in translation by studying a previously
underresearched genre in a linguistic environment not studied before. Second, it provides
some evidence against the claim that the hypotactic structure is disappearing in German
by showing that, though there is a trend towards parataxis in business articles, hypotaxis is
still the preferred syntactic structure.
24
Bouzouita, Miriam
On the Use of Parallel Biblical Corpora in Historical Linguistics: a Case Study of the
Spanish Biblia Medieval Corpus for Examining Information Structure
As is well known, historical parallel corpora are a useful tool as they permit scholars to
compare translational equivalents of a single original that have been composed at different
periods, all while abstracting away from the influence of contextual and situational
dimensions that condition variation in older texts (Enrique-Arias & Davies in press). This
study tries to contribute to this discussion of the use of parallel biblical corpora in
Historical Linguistics. More concretely, it critically evaluates the benefits and the
limitations of the Spanish Biblia Medieval corpus for the historical study of syntaxpragmatics interface phenomena.
Biblia Medieval is the first aligned parallel corpus of medieval Spanish and is freely
accessible online (www.bibliamedieval.es). Not only does it enable linguists to consult
and compare side by side the existing medieval Spanish versions of the Bible, but it also
provides access to the facsimiles of the originals. The phenomena to be examined in this
study include left-dislocations and focalisations, as exemplified respectively in the
following minimal pairs:
[Joshua 1:3]
(1a) Tod el logar que pisaredes con vuestros pies a vos le daré
All the place that step with your feet to you CL will-give
(Fazienda de Ultramar)
(1b) Toda la tierra por do vuestro pie andare vos daré
All the land through where your foot walk CL will-give (Escorial I.i.8)
‘Every place on which you will put your feet, I will give to you.’
[Exodus 32:33]
(2a) Qui peccare en mi desfer lo é de mio libro
Who sins in me undo-CL will of my book
(Fazienda de Ultramar)
(2b) Al que contra mi peccare dessataré yo del mio libro
ACC-the that against me sins will-undo I of-the my book
‘Whoever sins against me, I will blot out of my book.’
(General Estoria I)
25
As can be seen, while the examples in (a) contain a resumptive pronoun that is
coreferential with the constituent that appears at the left periphery, no such pronoun is
present in (b) for the same verse. Examples such as these clearly illustrate that there
appears to be an overlap in the pragmatic uses of left-dislocations and focalisations,
despite differing syntactic realisations. The structural and pragmatic properties of both
phenomena will be examined and it will be shown that existing theoretical views will need
to be revised in light of this historical data.
Enrique-Arias, Andrés / Mark Davies (in press): “Research on Historical Pragmatics with
Biblia Medieval (an Aligned Corpus of Medieval Spanish).” In: Pusch, Claus D. (ed.),
Romance Corpus Linguistics III: Corpora and Pragmatics. Tübingen: Narr.
26
Cesiri, Daniela / Colaci, Laura Antonella:
'The Euro Crisis’ in The Economist, Der Spiegel and Il Sole 24 ORE: a Contrastive and
Corpus-Based Study
Metaphors are a linguistic and rhetoric device particularly productive in the language of
economics since they are used to “represent abstract and often complex concepts” (Gotti
2008: 57). For this reason, metaphors used in economic and business discourse have been
the core of a wide number of linguistic studies, which focus on different aspects of the
topic, using different methodological frameworks and studying different languages. For
instance, one could name, among many others, contributions such as Henderson (2000),
White (2003), Tribe (1988 and 2007), Cortés de los Ríos (2010), which consider
metaphors in one language. There are also studies considering an intercultural and
contrastive approach, such as Kermas (2006) for a comparison between British and
American business and economic discourse, Bratož (2004), who compares metaphors in
English and Slovene popular economic discourse, Capra (2005) for a similar analysis in
Italian and Spanish, Urbonaitė / Šeškauskienė (2007) for a contrastive analysis in English
and Lithuanian political and economic discourse and, finally, Kovács (2007), which
contrasts metaphors in the business discourse in three languages: English, German and
Hungarian. In a previous study (Cesiri / Colaci 2011), a contrastive approach considered
metaphors describing the global crisis as used in three internationally-renowned financial
journals, such as The Economist in English, Der Spiegel in German and Il Sole 24 ORE in
Italian. Using the computer program for corpus analysis WordSmith Tools 5.0 (Scott
2008), the semantic fields most frequently used were examined in order to understand
whether metaphors referring to the global crisis, started in 2008, followed the traditional
pattern found in other economic texts or whether new fields were purposely created for
that particular phenomenon. The analysis of the metaphors used in three different
languages provided interesting perspectives on the inter- and cross-cultural influences
determining the preference for certain semantic fields instead of others.
The aim of the present study is to continue the work undertaken in Cesiri / Colaci (2011)
and to provide further insights into the use of metaphors in the field of financial
international crises. In particular, Wordsmith Tools 5.0 will be used again to search the
The Economist, Der Spiegel and Il Sole 24 ORE for those metaphors employed to refer to
the current ‘euro crisis’ (cf. Pisani-Ferry 2012). The study will use a contrastive approach
in investigating the metaphors found since each language can be virtually representative
of the corresponding culture. Thus, metaphorical expressions might give useful insights
into the ways European countries try (and are currently trying) to deal with the crisis
involving the common currency.
27
Finally, this particular contrastive perspective will allow the present authors to consider
the culturally-influenced use of metaphors in relation to other disciplines that applied
linguistics, such as international economics and finance and intercultural studies since it
will also consider economic and political relationships between the European countries.
This might also shed light on the way a common crisis can influence linguistic choices in
the language used by national media to report on such global topics.
References
Bratož, Silvia (2004). A Comparative Study of Metaphor in English and Slovene Popular
Economic Discourse. Managing Global Transitions 2 (2), 179-196.
Capra, Daniela (2005). Presenza e funzioni della fraseologia nel giornalismo economico:
Italia e Spagna a confronto. AISPI. Actas XXIII, 89-103.
Cesiri, Daniela / Colaci, Laura (2011). Metaphors on The Global Crisis in Economic
Discourse: A Corpus-Based Comparison of The Economist, Der Spiegel and Il Sole 24
Ore. RASSEGNA Italiana di Linguistica Applicata 1-2, 201-224.
Cortés de los Ríos, María Enriqueta (2010). Cognitive devices to communicate the
economic crisis: An analysis through covers in The Economist. Ibérica 20, 81-106.
The Economist. Online Edition. Available at <https://www.economist.com>.
Gotti, Maurizio (2008). Investigating Specialized Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang.
Henderson, Willie (2000). Metaphor, economics and ESP: some comments. English for
Specific Purposes 19, 167-173.
Kermas, Susan (2006). Metaphor and Ideology in Business and Economic Discourse in
British and American English. In Flowerdew, John / Gotti, Maurizio (eds)., Studies in
Specialized Discourse. Bern: Peter Lang, 109-130.
Kovács Éva (2007). Metaphors in English, German and Hungarian Business Discourse: A
Contrastive Analysis. Eger Journal of English Studies VII, 111–128.
Pisani-Ferry, Jean (2012). The euro crisis and the new impossible trinity. Bruegel Policy
Contribution 1, 1-16.
28
Tribe, Keith (1988). Governing Economy. The Reformation of German Economic
Discourse 1750-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tribe, Keith (2007). Strategies of Economic Order. German Economic Discourse, 17501950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
White, Michael (2003). Metaphor and economics: the case of growth. English for Specific
Purposes 22, 131–151.
Scott, Michael (2008). Wordsmith Tools Version 5.0. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis
Software.
Il Sole 24 ORE. Online Edition. Available at: <http://www.ilsole24ore.com>.
Der Spiegel. Online Edition. Available at: <http://www.spiegel.de>.
Urbonaitė, Justina / Šeškauskienė, Inesa (2007). HEALTH Metaphor in Political
and Economic Discourse: a Cross-Linguistic Analysis. Studies about Languages 11,
68-73.
29
Chen, Wallace:
Using Parallel and Comparable Corpora in Teaching Chinese-English Sight Translation
Students in a sight translation class are faced with a wide variety of linguistic issues. A
systematic analysis on these difficulties enables the instructor to identify highly frequent
translational problems of common nature, including lexical use, structure, grammar,
omission, repetition, etc. Also, different students tend to show their own translational
issues. By using parallel and comparable corpora, this study aims to establish a systematic
approach to analyzing common and individual linguistic difficulties in a Chinese-English
sight translation class.
The study involves sight translation students transcribing their recorded midterm and final
examinations, which are graded by the instructor and marked with a set of interpreting
comment tags developed by the researcher. All the graded transcripts are then uploaded to
a concordancer for the calculation of highly frequent comment tags that represent the most
common translation issues faced by students in a sight translation class. Individual issues
are also revealed in this process with the aid of student identifiers inserted in the
transcripts.
Next, the students are asked to use two corpora specifically built for their sight translation
classes: (1) the Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of Speeches (CEPCS), and (2) the
comparable Corpus of English Speeches (CES). The two corpora are used for the purpose
of finding candidate translations that may address the issues the students are faced with
during the examinations. CEPCS contains Chinese speeches in the areas of politics, trade
and economy, as well as their translations into English, while CES provides parallel texts
in English that are comparable to the Chinese examinations in terms of topics and genres.
These include the State of the Union addresses by two former presidents of the United
States, as well as remarks and speeches made by high-ranking U.S. officials. Sight
translation students utilize both the CEPCS and CES corpora to search for idiomatic
collocation, terminology, set phrases and other useful linguistic features that may improve
their sight translation competence. CEPCS and CES also complement each other, with the
former providing ready-made English translations of Chinese cultural-specific terms,
while the latter offering English expressions that are more idiomatic and not commonly
found in CEPCS.
30
Ciabarri, Federica:
A Contrastive Analysis of Reformulation Markers in English and Italian
The aim of this paper is a contrastive analysis of reformulation markers in spoken English
and Italian. Broadly speaking, reformulation markers are a particular kind of discourse
markers that allow the speaker to revisit a previous statement (Gülich & Kotschi 1983;
1987; Charolles & Coltier 1986; Roulet 1987; Rossari 1994; Del Saz Rubio & Fraser
2003). Reformulation markers create textual cohesion and are meant to avoid possible
misunderstandings (see examples).
1.
come avviene questo passaggio di informazione cioè come si trasforma
un’informazione da una lingua a un’altra
[The way in which this information transmission happens cioè how information is
transformed from one language to another] [LIP NA12]
2.
Do you think Shakespeare really saw all those things in / I think / I think people ever
since tried to <,> read more into it / I mean I don’t know whether he really did [ICEGB S1A22]
The analysis will be carried out on two corpora comparable for the size and the type of
data collected: the LIP corpus for Italian and the spoken section of ICE-GB for English.
In the first part of this paper, we will perform an exploratory analysis on a sample of
corpus excerpts, in order to map most of potential reformulation markers in the two
languages. At this stage the comparison will be centred on the number and on the variety
of expressions the two languages dispose of. Special attention will be paid to the formal
characteristics of those markers (simple vs. complex forms, grammatical category, the
semantic source of these expressions, etc.)
In the second part of the analysis, the most frequent reformulation marker in the two
languages will be analysed according to the guidelines of parametric analysis (cf. Degand
& Bestgen 2004; Spooren & Degand 2010) in order to describe the kind of reformulation
expressed with a particular attention to the context and co-text in which the markers
occur.
From the combination of the two analyses we aim to draw a clearer picture of the
similarities and the differences in the use of reformulation markers in the two languages.
In a preliminary pilot study, we observed that in spoken English the number of
reformulation markers per million words is significantly higher than Italian (χ2=441,
df=1, p=0.05). Also, in English the most common reformulation markers tend to be
31
syntactically complex (e.g. I mean, you know, you see), whereas in Italian they are more
likely to be single words (e.g. cioè (that is, I mean), ecco (here is), anzi (rather, indeed)).
Among the 10 most frequent reformulation markers identified in the exploratory pilot
study, we see that in Italian 9 of them are adverbs (ecco (here is), allora (then)) and
conjunctions (insomma (after all), quindi (therefore)) and only one is a verb (diciamo
(let’s say)); in contrast in English reformulation markers belong to a wider range of
grammatical forms: verbs (I mean, you know), nouns (sort of, kind of) and adverbs (so,
then).
References
Charolles, Michel, and Danielle Coltier. 1986. “Le control de la compréhension dans une
activité rédactionelle: élements pour l’analyse des reformulations paraphrastiques.”
Pratiques 49: 51–66.
Degand, Liesbeth, and Yves Bestgen. 2004. “Connecteurs et analyses de corpus: de
l’analyse manuelle à l’analyse automatisée.” In L’unité Texte, eds. Sylvie Porhiel and
Dominique Klingler, 49–73. Pleyben: Perspectives.
Gülich, Elisabeth, and Thomas Kotschi. 1983. “Les marqueurs de la reformulation
paraphrastique.” Cahiers de linguistique française 5: 305–351.
Gülich, Elisabeth, and Thomas Kotschi.1987. “Les actes de reformulation dans la
consultation ‘La dame de caluire’.” In L’analyse des interactions verbales. La dame de
caluire: une consultation, ed. Pierre Bange, 15–81. Berne: Peter Lang.
Rossari, Corinne. 1994. Les opérations de reformulation. Analyse du processus et des
marques dans une perspective contrastive français-italien. Berne: Peter Lang.
Roulet, Eddy. 1987. “Complétude interactive et connecteurs reformulatifs.” Cahiers de
linguistique française 8: 111–140.
Del Saz Rubio, Milagros, and Bruce Fraser. 2003. “Reformulation in English.”
people.bu.edu/ bfraser/Reformulation%20Marker%20Papers/deSaz%20&%20Fraser%20%202003%20-%20RF% 20in%20English.doc.
Spooren, Wilbert, and Liesbeth Degand. 2010. “Coding Coherence Relations: Reliability
and Validity.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 6 (2): 241–266.
doi:10.1515/CLLT.2010.009.
32
Curell, Hortènsia:
Expression of Motion Events in English and Catalan L1, and English L2
The aim of this paper is to contrast the expression of motion events by native speakers of
English, native speakers of Catalan and Catalan advanced learners of English. It is based
on Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) typological work on lexicalization patterns and on
Slobin’s (1996, 1997, 2006) theory of thinking for speaking. Catalan is a verb-framed
language, whereas English is satellite-framed. In terms of the expression of motion, in the
former path is expressed by the verb, and in the latter it is expressed by an element
associated with the verb (particles and prepositions).
(1)
(2)
El nen va sortir corrent de la casa.
‘the boy went out running from the house’
The boy ran out of the house.
In satellite-framed languages the manner component can typically be conflated with the
motion verb, whereas in verb-framed languages manner verbs can only be used when
manner is foregrounded, but never in cross-boundary path constructions (Aske 1989,
Slobin 1996), (3) and (4). Manner, if at all, is typically expressed by means of adjuncts, as
can be seen in example (1): corrent ‘running’.
(3)
(4)
The frog swam into the cave.
*La granota va nedar dintre de la cova.
This has consequences in various more general aspects of the expression of motion: 1)
amount of manner-of-motion verbs (bigger in satellite-framed than in verb-framed), an
example like (5) would be totally impossible in Catalan; 2) path elaboration (higher in
satellite-framed than in verb-framed); 3) description of the location of protagonists (more
sophisticated in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages); 4) alternative
expressions of manner (more varied in verb-framed than in satellite-framed languages)
(6).
(5)
(6)
Do not tread, mosey, hop, trample, step, plot, tiptoe, trot, traipse, meander, creep,
prance, amble, job, trudge, march, stomp, toddle, jump, stumble, trod, spring, or
walk on the plants. (Slobin 2006)
S’amaguen cautelosament darrere d’un tronc d’un arbre que està buit al terra.
‘they hide cautiously behind a tree trunk which is empty on the floor’
Even highly advanced learners of English, when narrating the frog story in English, show
a remarkable tendency to use the patterns of their L1 in all the aspects mentioned above.
33
In terms of the conflation of motion with manner plus a boundary-crossing path (Aske
1989, Slobin and Hoiting 1994), they do produce complex constructions, but only when
the phrasal verbs used are lexicalized:
(7)
He ran away from home.
By contrast, few produce complex constructions containing a non-lexical phrasal verb (8),
and even fewer use the typical satellite-framed strategy of accumulating and/or
elaborating path expressions (9).
(8)
(9)
The frog hopped away.
The deer threw them off over a cliff into the water.
As for the use of manner of motion verbs, they use very few of them, compared to native
speakers of English (Slobin 2005), and path elaboration is also much lower. On the other
hand, the alternative expressions of manner are much more varied, and the description of
the location of the protagonists is more sophisticated, as in their L1.
Selected references
Aske, Jon. 1989. ‘Path predicates in English and Spanish: A closer look’. Proceedings of
the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley
Linguistics Society, 1-14.
Slobin, Dan I. (1996). ‘From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking”. In John
J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 70-96.
Slobin, Dan I. (1997). Mind, code, and text. In J. Bybee, J. Haiman, & S. A. Thompson,
(Eds.), Essays on language function and language type: Dedicated to T. Givón.
Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 437-467.
Slobin, Dan I. (2006). “What makes manner of motion salient. Explorations in linguistic
typology, discourse, and cognition”. In M. Hickmann & S. Robert (Eds.), Space in
Languages: Linguistic systems and cognitive categories. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 59-81.
Slobin, Dan I. & Nini Hoiting (1994). Reference to movement in spoken and signed
languages: Typological considerations. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of
the Berkeley Linguistic Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 487-505.
34
Talmy, Leonard. (1991). Path to realization: A typology of event conflation. Proceedings
of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 480–519). Berkeley,
CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Talmy, Leonard. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In
Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 3: Grammatical
categories and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 47-159.
Talmy, Leonard. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
35
De Clerck, Bernard:
Deontic Modality in British and Indian English: a Closer Look at Business Communication
Indian and British English not only differ in spelling pronunciation, phonology and syntax
(see Pingali 2009; Mesthrie & Rakesh 2008), politeness and modality, too, are expressed
differently. According to Katikar (1984) could, would and shall are used more frequently
in Indian English than in British English. Mehrotra (1992) observes that tentative might
occurs less frequently despite the great importance that is attached to face, formality and
politeness, while Collins (2009) observes inter-varietal differences in the frequency of
central and quasi modals. Similarly, Rajalahti et al. (2012) observe that the use of modal
and quasi-modal verbs of obligation appears to be more frequent in the Asian varieties
than in the British and American varieties. Wilson (2005), however, observes that such
studies also possess a certain deficit in that intra-varietal variation across text-types is
often backgrounded in order to arrive at a general picture of the entire language variety
from which the corpus is constructed. In fact, together with Kirk (1994) he claims that
text-type is a more important factor in variation than regionality.
This paper focuses on one text type only, i.e. that of business letters and examines the
impact of regionality in greater depth. It will do so by expanding the scope from (quasi)
modal verbs of obligation to a more general and exhaustive description and analysis of
directive speech acts in both varieties of English. By reducing the number of text types
involved and expanding the scope of the actual topic from (deontic) modal verbs to
deontic expressions, we will transgress the level of the description and account for the
attested differences in uses of modals by offering a more integrated approach in which the
interplay of linguistic items in the expression of modality and politeness is systematically
explored. Multiple correspondence analysis will not only reveal statistically significant
differences in the use of modals, but also in the use of imperative structures, the politeness
marker please (see also Offergeld 2008), performative uses of the verb request and the use
of honorifics, all of which are related to more general cross-linguistic differences in the
realization of directive speech acts. Such an approach not only accounts for differences in
frequencies in the use modal verbs, it also lays bare potential areas of communicative
friction in the cross-cultural realization of directive speech acts in a business environment.
Data for this study are taken from the ICE-India and ICE-GB corpus.
References
Katikar, P.B. 1984. The meanings of the modals in Indian English. Unpublished Ph.D.
thesis. Shivaji University, Kolhapur.
36
Mehrotra, R.R. 1992. Verbalization of Polite Behaviour in Indian English. In The Third
International Symposium on Language and Linguistics. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn
University. 962-971.
Mesthrie, R., and R. Bhatt. 2008. World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic
Varieties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Offergeld, M.A. 2008. Lexico-Grammatical Variation in the Use of REQUEST Strategies
in Indian and British ‘Letters to the Editor’: A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Study. Ph.D diss,
Otto-Von- Guericke-Universität Magdeburg.
Pingali S. 2009. Indian English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Wilson, A. 2005.
Modal verbs in written Indian English: A quantitative and comparative analysis of the
Kolhapur corpus using correspondence analysis. ICAME Journal 29: 151-170.
37
De Metsenaere, Hinde / Campe, Petra / Van de Velde, Marc
Translating German and Dutch Nominal Compounds: Syntactic and Semantic Contrasts
and Similarities
In this paper we present our ongoing corpus research into compounding, a linguistic
phenomenon that is very productive in German (e.g. Gaeta / Schlücker, eds., 2012) and
slightly more productive in German than in Dutch (e.g. Hüning / Schlücker 2010). In
order to investigate the syntactic and semantic contrasts and similarities between German
and Dutch nominal compounds (N+N) (e.g. Booij 1992, Donalies 2003, 2009, Hüning /
Schlücker 2010) as in example 1, we will report on:
(a) how nominal compounds are translated in both directions: by means of a compound or
an alternative construction (example 2) (e.g. Ermlich 2004, Mohamed 2011);
(b) the semantic differences which translations of such compounds may imply (example
3) (e.g. Campe 2008);
(c) the factors that may interact with these different types of translations, such as idiom of
the given languages (example 1) and so-called ‘translation universals’ (example 4) (e.g.
Van de Velde 2011, Becher 2011).
(1) – Metallfarbe / Metallfeder (F)
(metal paint / metal spring)
><
metaalverf - *metalen verf / metalen veer - ?metaalveer
(metal paint – *metal(lic) paint / metal(lic) spring - ?metal spring)
– Handfläche / open hand (F)
(hand palm / open hand)
><
Metallfeder / metalen veer (F)
(metal spring / metal(lic) spring)
(2) e.g. German compound vs. Dutch
– compound: Kernseife / huishoudzeep (F)
(curd soap / household soap)
– ‘van’-PP: Lebenszeichen / teken van leven (LM)
(life sign / sign of life)
– simple N: Kofferraum / koffer (F)
(boot space / boot)
– simple N Papierbögen / vellen papier (F)
+ simple N: (paper sheets / sheets paper)
38
– adj + N: Metallfeder / metalen veer (F)
(metal spring / metal(lic) spring)
(3) Volkspolizist >< politieagent (F)
(member of the East-German ‘Volkspolizei’ >< police officer)
Espressomachine >< Kaffeemaschine (M)
(espresso machine / coffee machine)
(4) Nachttisch / nachtkastje (and not: ‘nachttafeltje’) (F) (normalisation)
(night table / night cupboard)
regimentscommandant / Kommandeur (VH) (implicitation)
(regiment commander / commander)
boventanden / Schneidezähne (VH) (explicitation)
(upper teeth / incisors)
All aspects are analysed in a database of German en Dutch nominal compounds extracted
from our recently compiled 1,700,000-word-word bidirectional parallel literary corpus
(German-Dutch, Dutch-German). The compounds are systematically related to their
respective translations, translation types are distinguished, and translation (universal)
tendencies are highlighted. The original language corpora are used as comparable corpora.
The results of this analysis are used to find evidence for or against the translation
universal asymmetry hypothesis (Klaudy and Károly 2005).
Primary References
Franck, J. (2003): Lagerfeuer. Köln: Dumont – translated as Kampvuur. Amsterdam:
Wereldbibliotheek (F).
Mortier, E. (2001): Marcel. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff – translated as Marcel. Frankfurtam-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag (M).
Lange-Müller, K. (2000): Die Letzten. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag – translated as
De laatsten. Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek (LM).
Van Heulendonk, G. (1998): Aimez-vous les moules? Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers –
translated as Aimez-vous les moules? Wien: Residenz Verlag (VM).
39
Secondary References
Becher, V. (2011): Explicitation and Implicitation in Translation Studies: a Corpus-Based
Study of English-German and German-English Translations of Business Texts. Ph.D.
diss., Hamburg.
Booij, G. (1992): “Compounding in Dutch.” In: Rivista di Linguistica 4, 37-59.
Campe, P. (2008): “Dutch Translation Alternatives for the German Compound.”
Unpublished paper, AILA, August 2008, Essen.
Donalies, E. (2003): “Was ist eigentlich ein Kompositum?” In: Deutsche Sprache 31, 76–
93.
Donalies, E. (2009): “Eine Mandeltorte ist eine Torte mit Mandeln. Was ist eine
Herrentorte? Bedeutung nominaler Komposita”. In: Sprachreport 25.4, 15-17.
Ermlich, K. 2004. “Zur Wiedergabe deutscher Substantivkomposita im Englischen”. In:
Deutsch als Fremdsprache 41, 206-212.
Gaeta, L. / Schlücker, B. (eds., 2012): Das Deutsche als kompositionsfreudige Sprache.
Strukturelle Eigenschaften und systembezogene Aspekte. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter.
Hüning, M. / Schlücker, B. (2010): “Konvergenz und Divergenz in der Wortbildung.
Komposition im Niederländischen und im Deutschen.” In: A. Dammel / S. Kürschner / D.
Nübling (eds.), Kontrastive Germanistische Linguistik. Hildesheim / Zürich / New York:
Olms. 783-825.
Klaudy, K. / Károly, K. (2005): “Implicitation in Translation: Empirical Evidence for
Operational Asymmetry in Translation.” In: Across Languages and Cultures 6, 13-28.
Mohamed,
N.E.A.
(2011):
“Deutsche
Nominalkomposita
Übersetzungsproblematik ins Arabische.” In: Lebende Sprachen 56, 65-76.
und
ihre
Van de Velde, M. (2011): “Explizierung und Implizierung im Übersetzungspaar DeutschNiederländisch. Eine quantitative Untersuchung.” In: P. Schmitt / S. Herold / A. Weilandt
(eds.), Translationsforschung. Frankfurt/M.: Lang, 865-884..
40
De Sutter, Gert / Cappelle, Bert / Loock, Rudy:
Competing Motivations in Dutch/French Legal Translation: a Quantitative Corpus-Based
Study of the Interaction between Interference and Normalisation
In recent years more and more corpus-based translation scholars expressed their
dissatisfaction against the 'traditional' way of doing corpus-based translation studies,
mainly with respect to largely unquestioned theoretical and methodological assumptions
which have so far led to a general neglect of potentially important factors such as source
language influence (interference) and genre variation (e.g. House 2008, Becher 2010,
Bernardini & Ferraresi 2011). Moreover, most of the previous studies focus on only one
translation universal or law, leaving the question unanswered as to how different
universals and laws interact with each other.
The present study aims at answering this last question, while taking into account the
objections raised by the scholars mentioned above. More particularly, we want to
quantitatively investigate the interaction between the normalisation tendency (translators
tend to exaggerate typical features of the target language) and interference (translators
tend to transfer words and structures from the source to the target language) in legal
translations Dutch-French / French-Dutch. In order to determine whether normalization or
interference has the largest impact on translational behaviour in legal translations, we
selected the impersonal passive with er (Dutch; ex. 1a) or il (French; ex. 1b) as an
appropriate case study, as this structure is typical for administrative contexts:
(1a) Er wordt een stuurgroep opgericht (DPC-mvg)
(1b) Il est institué un groupe de pilotage (DPC-mvg)
The impersonal passive is available in both French and Dutch, but the impersonal passive
is significantly more frequent in Dutch compared to French, even in very formal genres as
legal translation (Devos et al. 1992). This observation basically provides the translator
with two possibilities: either transfer the structure (interference) or replace the structure by
a word or construction that is considered the more normal option in the target language
(normalization). It has to be noted that normalization is dependent on the translation
direction: when translating from French to Dutch, this means inserting new impersonal
passives where there are none in the source text; when translating from Dutch to French, it
means replacing Dutch impersonal passives by other, more usual words or constructions
(e.g., active sentences with impersonal on).
Building on the administrative component of the Dutch Parallel Corpus (n = 2.4M tokens;
Macken et al. 2011), all impersonal passives in French source texts and Dutch translations
as well as in all Dutch source texts and their French translations were extracted. First, the
41
normalized frequency of impersonal passives in non-translated legal Dutch and French
was computed, and then compared to the normalized frequencies of translated legal Dutch
and French. Next, the frequency of interference and normalisation was determined by
analyzing each sentence pair, and determining if the impersonal passive was transferred to
the target text, if the impersonal passive in the source text was altered in the target text or
if the impersonal passive was inserted in the target text without a triggering construction
in the source text.
Taking all these analyses together will enable us to determine the relative impact of
interference and normalization in each translation direction, and test to what extent the
difference is statistically significant. Preliminary analyses have already revealed that the
normalizing tendency outweighs interference in both translation directions.
42
Degand, Liesbeth / Gilquin, Gaëtanelle:
The Clustering of ‘Fluencemes’ in French and English
Different features can contribute to the fluency (or disfluency) of discourse, among which
speech rate, (filled and empty) pauses or discourse markers. These ‘fluencemes’ (the term
is taken from Götz 2011) seem to be present in all languages. However, the relatively few
studies that have performed a contrastive analysis of fluencemes reveal cross-linguistic
differences. Thus, it is well-known that filled pauses are language-specific, from English
'uh' or 'uhm' and French 'euh' to Spanish 'pues' or Japanese 'eeto', for instance (see Clark &
Fox Tree 2002: 92). Their use and selection may also differ significantly from one
language to the other, as demonstrated by Zhao & Jurafsky (2005) for English and
Mandarin Chinese. Similarly, discourse markers appear to have several equivalents crosslinguistically, which points towards language-specific functions (see, e.g., Aijmer &
Simon-Vandenbergen 2006).
In this presentation, we will adopt a French-English contrastive approach to test the
hypothesis that fluencemes do not occur in isolation, but tend to cluster together (cf.
Stenström 1990: 222, Aijmer 1997: 27). Using corpus data representing spontaneous
conversations in French and English (from the VALIBEL database and ICE-GB,
respectively), we will start from filled pauses (French 'euh' and English 'uh'/'uhm') and
examine what other fluencemes occur in their immediate environment, with special
emphasis on discourse markers, defined here very broadly as “any element of language
that plays a role in the organization of discourse” (Vincent 2005: 189). We will
investigate how French and English compare in this respect, both quantitatively (e.g. what
proportion of filled pauses cluster with other fluencemes in each language?) and
qualitatively (e.g. what types of discourse markers tend to cluster with filled pauses?).
Preliminary results reveal interesting differences between French and English. While
filled pauses are more frequent in English than in French (260 occurrences per 10,000
words in English, as against 181 in French), French filled pauses are proportionally more
likely to be immediately preceded or followed by a discourse marker than English filled
pauses (42% for French vs 28% for English). The most frequent discourse markers
accompanying French filled pauses are connectives ('et', 'mais', 'donc'), whereas there
seems to be more variation in English ('and', 'but' and 'so', but also 'well', 'I mean', 'you
know', etc.). A qualitative analysis will have to reveal whether these markers are used in
this context according to their ‘usual’ profile of use, or whether specific features are at
play. A word cluster analysis furthermore shows that the most frequent clusters with filled
pauses involve empty pauses, viz. 'euh' immediately followed by a short pause or a long
pause in French, and 'uhm' immediately followed or preceded by a short pause in English.
43
It thus appears that, both in French and in English, fluent or disfluent stretches of
discourse result from a combination of fluencemes, as illustrated by the following
examples:
(1)
ben oui mais donc euh / on / on a / on travaille jusqu'à mardi
(2)
I mean I think uhm space is you know I mean < > you know just the obstacles that
you have in a room
This suggests that fluency (or disfluency) should be viewed as a multifaceted
phenomenon, which should be investigated by means of an integrated approach (cf. Götz
2011). Further contrastive research will have to establish whether such an approach can
prove equally rewarding for other languages besides French and English.
References
Aijmer, K. 1997. I think: an English modal particle. In T. Swan & O. Jansen Westvik
(eds) Modality in Germanic Languages — Historical and Comparative Perspectives (pp.
1–47). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Aijmer, K. & A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen. 2006. Pragmatic Markers in Contrast.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Clark, H.H. & J.E. Fox Tree. 2002. Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition
84: 73-111.
Götz, S. 2011. Fluency in native and nonnative English speech. Theory, description,
implications. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Giessen: Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.
Stenström, A.-B. 1990. Pauses in monologue and dialogue. In J. Svartvik (ed.), The
London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English: Description and Research (pp. 211–252). Lund:
Lund University Press.
Vincent, D. 2005. The journey of non-standard discourse markers in Quebec French:
networks based on exemplification. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6(2): 188-210.
Zhao, Y. & D. Jurafsky. 2005. A preliminary study of Mandarin filled pauses.
Proceedings of DiSS'05, Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech Workshop. 10-12 September
2005, Aix-en-Provence, France, 179-182.
44
Delaere, Isabelle / Plevoets, Koen:
Are Translators Really That Conservative? A Corpus-Based, Multivariate Study of Linguistic Differences between Translated and Non-Translated Varieties of Belgian Dutch
In the field of translation studies, the last two decades have witnessed a huge amount of
empirical research on the linguistic differences between translations and non-translations.
However, it is clear by now that there is more to it than translated language on the one
hand and non-translated language on the other hand and that linguistic variation can be
explained by a wider variety of factors such as, for example, text type (Baker, 1999, p.
292; Neumann, 2011). Nevertheless, research on the influence of text type is still rather
limited and mainly focuses on English (Kruger & van Rooy, 2012). To investigate this
matter, we carried out three case studies, applying a multidimensional approach (i.e.
taking into account different factors simultaneously) which deals with multiple linguistic
variables and language pairs and which resulted in a number of interesting observations.
Using the Dutch Parallel Corpus (Macken, De Clercq & Paulussen, 2011) which, on the
one hand, consists of translated Dutch from English, translated Dutch from French and
non-translated Dutch and, on the other hand, contains a number of text types, we try to
meet some of the aforementioned demands in translation studies. Additionally, we apply a
statistical technique called profile-based correspondence analysis that allows us to
visualize the data so they can be interpreted more easily. In order to investigate the
normalization hypothesis, described by Kenny (2000, p. 94) as “the hypothesized
tendency of translators to produce translations that are linguistically conservative vis-à-vis
their source texts or texts originally produced in the target language” we conducted three
case studies. The first case study investigates the use of standard language versus
substandard language, thereby hypothesizing that translators will opt for the normalized
option, i.e. standard language. With a second case study, we expanded the research on the
use of standard language: we looked at the dispersion of General Standard Dutch versus
Belgian Standard Dutch. General Standard Dutch is the standard variety of Dutch in the
entire Dutch-speaking area (Belgium and the Netherlands). Belgian Standard Dutch, on
the other hand is the standard variety in Belgium only. So, if we look at these options
from the normalization perspective, we hypothesized that translators will opt for General
Standard Dutch. In the third case study we operationalized the normalization hypothesis
by investigating the dispersion of formal language alternatives versus informal or neutral
alternatives, based on the hypothesis that translators will opt for the conservative, i.e.
formal, alternatives.
Preliminary analyses show that not all attested variation can be attributed to the translators’ hypothesized conservative behavior, as in all three case studies the differences
between non-translated Dutch and Dutch translated from English are smaller than the
45
differences between non-translated Dutch and Dutch translated from French, which shows
that the differences are source language dependent. Additionally, we can see that
translators opt for different choices according to the text type , which also shows that the
differences cannot entirely be attributed to the translators’ assumed conservative behavior.
However, further, in depth analysis is needed and we want to find out what the other
factors are that we have not yet looked into. Aspects such as the translator’s background,
the role of the publishing companies, the use of translation memories etc. all play a role in
the final product and must be investigated in order to paint the bigger picture. We believe
that investigating the influence of factors such as text type and source language and their
combined influence is but the first step and with this research, we want to show that
further corpus-based, multivariate research is needed in the field of translation studies.
References
Baker, M. (1999). The Role of Corpora in Investigating the Linguistic Behaviour of
Professional Translators. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 4(2), 281-298.
Kenny, D. (2000). Lexical Hide-and-Seek: looking for creativity in a parallel corpus. In
M. Olohan (Ed.), Intercultural Faultlines: Research Models in Translation Studies I:
Textual and Cognitive Aspects (pp. 93-104). Manchester: St. Jerome.
Kruger, H., & van Rooy, B. (2012). Register and the features of translated language.
Across Languages and Cultures, 13(1), 33-65.
Macken, L., De Clercq, O. & Paulussen, H. (2011). Dutch Parallel Corpus: a Balanced
Copyright-Cleared Parallel Corpus. Meta, 56(2).
Neumann, S. (2011). Contrastive register variation. A quantitative approach to the
comparison of English and German. Berlin: de Gruyter.
46
Doms, Steven
Less Prototypical Agentive Subject-Predicate Constructions: a Contrastive and CorpusBased Research into English, French and Dutch
While subjects of sentences are prototypically realized as animate, acting entities (see
Dowty 1991 for a breakdown of prototypical features), less prototypical agentive subjectpredicate constructions can be attested as well, as illustrated in (1):
(1) Tables 1, 2 and 3 give an overview of all adverse events that were observed.
However, the degree of acceptance and the frequency of use of such less prototypical
patterns differ across languages, as shown in the unidiomatic literal Dutch translation in
(2b) of the English source sentence in (2a). A more idiomatic Dutch translation is found in
(2c).
(2a) Setting common policy objectives can give an impetus to reform.
(2b) ?Gemeenschappelijke beleidsdoelstellingen vastleggen kan een impuls tot
hervorming geven.
(2c) Gemeenschappelijke beleidsdoelstellingen vastleggen kan leiden tot hervormingen.
(gloss) Setting common policy objectives can lead to reforms.
This study zooms in on these cross-linguistic differences in English, French and Dutch by
examining the translations that are provided and the translation tactics (see Gambier 2009)
that are used in those cases where a literal translation is not possible. In doing so, it wants
to achieve three goals: 1) provide an overview of the translation tactics that are used, 2)
offer a more detailed overview of cross-linguistic differences, and 3) explore the
relationship between the nature of these differences and the ‘solutions’ that are provided
in translation.
The paper will be split up into three main parts. First, the boundaries of the study object
will be delimited by exploring the theoretical concepts that are involved. In this study, a
subject-predicate construction is prototypical in terms of agentivity, if the subject can
independently perform the action denoted by the predicate. Whenever the subject
argument cannot independently perform this action, the subject-predicate relation is
considered less prototypical, as in (1) and (2) above. Secondly, the methodology of this
research will be explained in detail. In total, 60 English predicates – all expressing an act
of giving or showing – serve as starting point to study the translation of English less
prototypical subject-predicate constructions. The English-French translation component is
based on results that were yielded from the Namur Corpus (cf. Paulussen 1999), whereas
for the English-Dutch translations the Dutch Parallel Corpus (cf. Rura, et al. 2008) was
47
used. In the third and final part of the paper, the results of this contrastive corpus-based
research will be presented. Preliminary results indicate that in somewhat less than half of
the translations found in the corpora the less prototypical source constructions are
maintained in the French and Dutch translations, which may in some cases be related to
interference from the source text. The majority of the translations, however, turn out to be
instances of normalization and frequent other translation tactics are the use of the passive
voice, nominalizations, and the introduction of another predicate or subject, changing the
semantics of the subject-predicate construction.
References
Dowty, D. (1991): "Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection." In: Language 67,
547-619.
Gambier, Y. (2009): "Stratégies et tactiques en traduction et interprétation." In: G. Hansen
/ A. Chesterman / H. Gerzymisch-Arbogast (eds.), Efforts and Models in Interpreting and
Translation Research. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 63-82.
Paulussen, H. (1999): A Corpus-Based Contrastive Analysis of English "on/up", Dutch
"op" and French "sur" within a Cognitive Framework. Unpublished PhD diss., Ghent
University.
Rura, L. / Vandeweghe, W. / Perez, M. M. (2008): "Designing a Parallel Corpus as a
Multi-functional Translator's Aid." In: Proceedings of the XVIII FIT World Congress, 4-7
August 2008, Shanghai. http://www.kuleuven-kulak.be/DPC/algemeen/src/FIT2008rural.pdf. 02-07-2011.
48
Ebeling, Jarle / Oksefjell Ebeling, Signe
For Pete's Sake! A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study of the English/Norwegian Patterns
"for * sake/skyld"
In this paper we report on a contrastive analysis of two similar-looking patterns in English
and Norwegian. Although "for * sake" and "for * skyld" are patterns that may be said to
express the same meanings, a closer look at their distribution in the English-Norwegian
Parallel Corpus (Johansson 2007) reveals marked differences in their frequency and use.
According to Oxford Dictionaries Online, "for * sake" can be said to express three
different meanings: (a) for the purpose of, (b) out of consideration for or in order to help
or please someone, and (c) to express impatience, annoyance, urgency, or desperation.
These three distinct uses seem to be valid also for the Norwegian counterpart "for *
skyld", as evidenced by examples (1)-(3) from the corpus, respectively:
(1) For sikkerhets skyld ber jeg ham tie om at vi har en kopi.
For safety's sake, I ask him not to tell anyone that we have a copy.
(2) En gang sa hun at hun gjorde det for pappas skyld og for oss, så vi hadde penger nok.
Once she said that she was doing it for Dad's sake, so that we would have enough money.
(3) Si noe, for Guds skyld!
Say something, for God's sake!
This similarity in meaning notwithstanding, preliminary corpus searches suggest that the
pattern is significantly more frequent in English (LL=6.05, Df=1, p < 0.05). Moreover,
translational data point to non-correspondence between the two patterns in quite a
substantial number of cases, showing a fairly low mutual correspondence (Altenberg
1999) of around 31%, i.e. the patterns are only used as translations of each other in 1/3 of
the cases. It also becomes evident that the use illustrated in example (3) is the
predominant one in English, while this is not the case in Norwegian where one particular
collocation is dominant, viz. "for sikkerhets skyld", as illustrated in (1).
By carrying out a contrastive analysis on the basis of the extended version of the fiction
part of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC+), this paper aims to shed light on
the conditions of use (Chesterman 1998) of these two apparently synonymous patterns.
More specifically, we seek answers to the following questions:
• What are the translations/sources of the two patterns?
• Do translations/sources point to specific conditions of use of either pattern?
49
Although the ENPC+ is parallel both in the sense of containing comparable monolingual
data and bidirectional translation data, our study will be complemented with data from
large comparable monolingual corpora in both languages, notably the British National
Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English for English and
Leksikografisk bokmålskorpus for Norwegian.
Primary sources
The British National Corpus (BNC) : http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) : http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC):
http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/ enpc/
Leksikografisk bokmålskorpus (LBK):
http://www.hf.uio.no/iln/tjenester/kunnskap/sprak/korpus/
skriftsprakskorpus/lbk/index.html
References
Altenberg, Bengt (1999): "Adverbial Connectors in English and Swedish: Semantic and
Lexical Correspondences." In: H. Hasselgård / S. Oksefjell (eds.), Out of Corpora: Studies
in Honour of Stig Johansson. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 249-268.
Chesterman, Andrew (1998): Contrastive Functional Analysis. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Johansson, Stig (2007): Seeing through Multilingual Corpora: On the Use of Corpora in
Contrastive Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Oxford Dictionaries Online – Oxford University Press, http://oxforddictionaries.com/
(accessed 16 September 2012).
50
Fetzer, Anita / Speyer, Augustin:
Discourse Relations in English and German Argumentative Discourse: A Contrastive
Analysis of Their Overt and Non-Overt Realization in Adjacent and Non-Adjacent
Positions
This paper examines the overt and non-overt coding of coordinating discourse relations of
Continuation and Contrast, and the subordinating discourse relations of Elaboration,
Explanation and Comment in the argumentative discourse genre of editorial based on a
contrastive study of 24 British English and German texts. Particular attention is given to
the linguistic coding of discourse relations positioned adjacently and non-adjacently, and
to the question of granularity. The analysis of the German editorials is based on the
syntactic unit of sentence, while their British counterpart is based on the syntactic unit of
clause. This is because ‘sentence’ is a logic-based unit in German, while it is more of an
orthographic, and less of a logic-based unit in English. An analysis of clauses in German
is not considered to be appropriate because of their rather high degree of embeddedness.
The methodological framework is an integrated one, supplementing the SegmentedDiscourse-Representation based definition of discourse relation (Asher and Lascarides
2003) with the Systemic-Functional-Grammar concepts of multiple themes and thematic
progression (Halliday 1994), and applying them to a quantitative and qualitative corpus
analysis using the pragmatic tools of inference and implicature, and the discourse-analytic
tools of sequencing and coherence. Context is accommodated explicitly in the analysis:
social context is accounted for through the discourse genre of editorial, linguistic context
is accounted for through adjacency, and cognitive context is accounted for through
inference.
In both sets of data, there is a strong correlation between the overt marking of a relation in
a clause / sentence and the locality of the clause / sentence standing in relation to the
clause / sentence under consideration. More precisely, if a sentence SA in German stands
in a relation to a sentence SB that
does not immediately precede SA, but that is separated from SA by at least one sentence,
the readiness to mark relations overtly is much more developed. For the British data, the
situation is different. Here, the readiness to mark subordinating discourse relations
between directly adjacent clause-anchored discourse units is much more developed than
for sentence-anchored non-adjacently positioned discourse units.
In the data at hand, the two languages code the discourse relation of Contrast overtly in
adjacent and non-adjacent positioning but employ different strategies as regards the overt
coding of the coordinating discourse relation of Continuation and the subordinating
discourse relations of Elaboration, Explanation and Comment. The rate of overt marking
51
for adjacently positioned coordinating relations is higher in the German data. In the
British data, there is hardly any difference between the overt marking of adjacently
positioned discourse relations holding between clauses and sentences. The overt marking
of subordinating discourse relations is lower in the German data, and in the British data,
there is a clear preference for coding adjacently positioned subordinating discourse
relations in an overt manner on the level of clause.
References
Asher, Nicholas and Lascarides, Alex (2003): Logics of Conversation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Fetzer, Anita and Speyer, Augustin (2012): Discourse relations in context. Local and notso-local constraints. Intercultural Pragmatics 9(4): 413-452.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994): Introduction to English Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.
52
Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana
Sentence Splitting and Sentence Joining in Translation
Most existing corpus-based analyses focusing on the contrasts between source texts and
translations are either purely lexical or are constrained by sentence boundaries (e.g.
Johansson and Hofland 2000, Schmied and Fink 2000, Frankenberg-Garcia 2005,
Johansson 2007, Pérez Blanco 2009 and Saldanha 2011). Probably the main reason
underlying this limitation is the fact that, in parallel corpora, texts are usually segmented
at the level of the sentence due to the relative ease with which sentence boundaries can be
identified automatically. The alignment of source texts and translations is then usually
carried out such that whenever there is not a one-to-one correspondence between sourcetext and translation segments, they are aligned either on a one-to-many or on a many-toone basis, blurring out the details of what happens when source-text sentence boundaries
are changed in translation.
The aim of the present exploratory study is to take a closer look at sentences that
translators split apart and join together. Using COMPARA, a parallel, bidirectional corpus
of Portuguese and English fiction of 3 million words whose alignment was manually postedited so as to differentiate between one-to-one, one-to-many, one-to-part and one-to-zero
alignment, it was possible to analyse from a quantitative perspective over 90 thousand
source-text sentences and their corresponding text in translation. The idea was to find out
more about the extent to which sentences are split apart and joined together, whether
sentence splitting is more common than sentence joining, and whether translation
direction can affect this. A closer look was also taken at a sample of over one thousand
segments involving sentence joining and splitting, so as to find out more about how
translators in both language directions go about splitting and joining sentences. From a
theoretical perspective, the analysis supports the ideas of explicitation and normalization
in both Portuguese to English and
English to Portuguese translation. From a practical perspective, there are implications for
translator education and the development of CAT tools.
References
Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (2005): "A Corpus-Based Study of Loan Words in Original and
Translated Texts." In: P. Danielsson / M. Wagenmakers (eds.), Proceedings of the Corpus
Linguistics 2005 conference, Birmingham, UK, 14-17 July. (http://www.corpus.bham.ac.
uk/pclc/index.shtml)
Johansson, S. (2007): Seeing through Multilingual Corpora: On the Use of Corpora in
Contrastive Studies. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.
53
Johansson, S. / Hofland, K. (2000): “The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus: Current
Work and New Directions.” In: P. Botley / T. McEnery / A. Wilson (eds.), Multilingual
Corpora in Teaching and Research. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 134-147.
Pérez Blanco, M. (2009): "Translating Stance adverbials from English into Spanish: a
Corpus-Based Study." In: International Journal of Translation 21, 41-55.
Saldanha, G. (2011): "Translator Style: Methodological Considerations." In: The
Translator 17, 25-50.
Schmied, J. / Fink, B. (2000): “Corpus-Based Contrastive Lexicology: the Case of with
and Its German Equivalents.” In: P. Botley / T. McEnery / A. Wilson (eds.), Multilingual
Corpora in Teaching and Research. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 157-176.
54
Gallego-Hernández, Daniel
A Comparative Corpus-Based Analysis of Metadiscourse in COMENEGO
The COMENEGO project (Corpus Multilingüe de Economía y Negocios), which is
designing a virtual platform that will allow business translators to exploit an online
multilingual specialised corpus, involves, among other stages, analyzing the textual data
which integrate the pilot corpus COMENEGO. This pilot corpus is divided into
subcorpora categorized by text-type/discourse genre categories. These categories have
been established according to pragmatic and subjective criteria. The pilot corpus is being
analysed in order to investigate the validity of these categories according to
metadiscursive criteria, among others.
The aim of this paper is to carry out a corpus-based analysis of metadiscourse in these
categories and to present the results to which this study has led us. This analysis should
help us to reject, confirm or amend these categories, as well as to enable us to characterize
business language and also integrate the texts better into the virtual platform of the corpus.
55
Gonzalez-Alvarez, Elsa / Doval-Suarez, Susana:
The Use of Extraposition in the Written Production of Spanish Advanced Learners of
English (*)
This study is part of a wider project (1) on the problems found by advanced English L2
learners when dealing with marked Information Stucture constructions (i.e. clefts,
extraposition, inversion and fronting). Advanced learner written or oral production has
been desccribed as grammatically and lexically correct but still foreign-sounding. It has
been suggested that this maybe due to overuse or underuse of certain structures or lexical
items (Gilquin 2001, Granger et al. 2002). The focusing device of extraposition has been
shown to be over-represented in the English L2 production of learners from different L1
backgrounds: Swedish (Bostöm Aronsson 2003), German (Callies 2009). On the basis of
material from two comparable corpora, the Spanish component of the ICLE (International
Corpus of Learner English) and the LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English
Essays) the present study aims at comparing the use of extraposition by advanced Spanish
learners of L2 English and English native speakers in terms of frequency of use and
discourse function.
(*) Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, project reference FFI2010-19380
References
Boström Aronsson, M. (2003): “On Clefts and Information Structure in Swedish EFL
Writing”. In: Sylviane Granger / Stephanie Petch-Tyson (eds.), Extending the Scope of
Corpus-Based Research: New Applications, New Challenges. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 197210.
Callies, M. (2009): Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Gilquin, G. (2001): "The Integrated Contrastive Model: Spicing Up Your Data." In:
Languages in Contrast 3, 95-123.
Doval Suárez, S. M. / E. González Álvarez (to appear): “The Use of it-Clefts in the
Written Production of Spanish Advanced Learners of English". In: Linguistics and the
Human Sciences 6, 151-172.
Granger, S. / Dagneaux, E. / Meunier, F. (2002): The International Corpus of Learner
English. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
56
Hsieh, Shelley Ching-Yu:
A Contrastive Linguistic Study of 'Salty'
Salt is necessary for cooking and is an essential nutrient for human body. Salt and salty
utterances, such as the common saying kòe-kiâm-chúi 過鹹水 ‘pass-salty-water = go
abroad’, also play a role in our language. This study collects utterances related to salty in
Southern Min (hereafter SM) corpora and dictionaries. Data from Mandarin Chinese
(MCh) and German will be taken as counterparts for comparison. Script category (Nguyen
and Murphy 2003) and the typology of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages
(Talmy 2000) are adopted as theoretical background for the purpose of observing the
social communicative function of the salty utterances as well as judging the language type
of Southern Min.
The collocations of salty can be categorized into 32 collocation types in SM and 15 types
in MCh. They can be Act (actions), Quantifier (restriction of the amount), State (the
condition of an entity or event), etc. Table 1 presents significant collocation types in SM
and MCh.
Table 1. The collocation types of salty in SM and MCh salty in SM salty in MCh
Rank Type (%) Rank Type (%)
A-Salty
1 Act (4.03 %)
2 Extent (3.02%)
3 Quantifier (1.76%)
4 Taste (1.26%)
5 Fruit (0.76%)
1 Act (6.41%)
1 Extent (6.41%)
2 Quantifier (2.56%)
2 Place (2.56%)
3 Language (1.28%)
Salty-B
1 Food (3.78%)
2 Taste (2.02%)
3 Place (1.26%)
4 State (1.01%)
5 Extent (0.76%)
1 Food (6.41%)
2 Extent (2.56%)
2 Taste (2.56%)
3 Choice (1.28%)
3 Nature (1.28%)
There is no doubt that food and eating are important in both MCh and SM speaking
communities. Meanwhile, we see the importance of salt producing in SM area. This is
pointed out by collocation types of salty in SM. This culture feature echoes the finding in
(Hsieh 2012) where she states that salt expressions in German signifies the widely use of
salt as medicine and health caring product in
57
Germany but the salt expressions in Southern Min shows that this area is prosperous in
salt production. The result of the analysis of motion events in German salty utterances
confirms the truth value of what Talmy (2000) proposed that German is a satellite-framed
language (see Table 2). A step further to examine the salty utterances in SM, the verbs
carry MOTION and PATH takes only scanty portion in either our SM salt or salty data.
SM tends to be a verb-framed language.
Table 2. Motion events in salt collocation
Verbs in motion event
Percentage
German:
verbs carry MANNER
15.6%
verbs carry MOTION and PATH 12%
Southern Min:
verbs carry MANNER
6.34%
verbs carry MOTION and PATH 27.95%
Not only culture attributes are informed by salty utterance, salty metaphors also indicate
that they are capable in social communication. Script categories like +physical product,
+personal trait, +cuisine/food, +life philosophy, +criticism are all communicative with
salty. SM salty also performs linguistic characteristics of the language, e.g., ABB
morphological structure, portion-mass metonym, a free element in meronymic hierarchy,
and a semantic marker for stingy personality. The nature provides salt for human body as
nutrient, for language use, and for social communication. Language type is made
transparent with simple salt and
salty utterances.
References
Hsieh, Shelley Ching-yu. 2012. Salt Expressions in Southern Min and German.
International Conference of Southern Min Culture, Quanzhou Normal College, China,
December, 1-2.
Nguyen, Simone. P. & Murphy, Gregory. L. (2003). An Apple Is More Than Just a Fruit:
Cross-Classification in Children's Concepts. Child Development, 74(6): 1783-1806.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, London: MIT Press.
58
Huotari, Léa:
Back to “Translation Universals” for Methodology’s Sake
Although the so-called translation universals have met with criticism, are considered vain
by many scholars (see House 2008 and Tymoczko 2005) and the term translation
universal has not achieved unanimous backing, we argue that it is still important to
continue to carry out tests on them for methodological reasons (see also Chesterman 2004,
2010). Interestingly, even though many researchers (see e.g. Kenny cited in Olohan 2004:
92) state that the explanation for translation universals is likely to be cognitive, very few
corpus studies have actually tried to explain them from a cognitive perspective.
Following on Halverson’s (1999, 2003) proposal of a cognitive basis for the so-called
translation universals, we offer a corpus based case-study dealing with the humanization
of the syntactic subject in French-Finnish-French translations to test her cognitive model.
The humanization of the subject in translation has first been described by Chevalier
(1995) and consists of a shift of subject from the source text (ST) to the target text(TT) as
in
ST: Lee’s mouth was full and benevolent. (Chevalier 1995)
TT: “Il avait une bouche large et bonne”
[literally: He had a big and pleasant/good mouth.]
where an inanimate subject “Lee’s mouth” in the ST becomes animate “he” in the French
translation. This humanization of the syntactic subject is offered as a potential candidate
for so-called translation universals as it could be the product of normalization, a feature
hypothesized to be characteristic of translated texts (see Baker 1993 and 1995). Indeed,
Laury (2006: 153) notes that the animate human referent is more prototypical: “a wide
range of scholars have made the observation, robustly supported by empirical evidence,
that human referents tend to manifest features prominence on the level of both discourse
and grammar. Namely, human referents [i.e. animate subjects], are likely to be topical and
agentive and they are consequently likely to appear in core grammatical roles, especially
as subjects”. See also Bock (1986), Chafe (1976) and Parrill (2008). If normalization do
happen in translation, as human subjects tend to be more prototypical we should expect a
higher number of them in translations.
In this case study, the focus is on one particular source of prototype effect (see Lakoff
1987): metonymy. Metonymy indeed seems to explain the humanization of the subject in
translation. In the example cited above, the whole “he” is preferred in the TT to the body
part of the ST is. This paper will also address some corpus design issues. As metonymy is
a mode of discourse in literature and poetry, the use of literary corpus seems not to be the
59
most appropriate corpus to test for this particular source of prototype effect. The need for
a contrastive analysis when dealing with languages typologically as different as French
and Finnish will also be discussed.
References
Baker M. 1993. Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and
applications. In M.Baker, G. Francis & E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds.) Text and technology: In
honor of John Sinclair. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 233–250.
Bock, J. K. (1986). Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology
18. 355–387.
Chafe W. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of
view. Ch. N. Li (Ed.). Subject and Topic. New York : Academic Press. 25–55.
Chesterman, A. 2010a. Why study translation universals? In Hartama-Heinonen R. &
Kukkonen P. (red.) Kiasm. Helsingfors universitet: Nordica, svensk översättning, 38-48.
Chesterman, A. 2010b. Plenary talk: Response and discussion. Paper presented at MATS
2010 Symposium, Ghent, Belgium, 8–9 January 2010.
Chevalier J.C., 1995. D’une figure de traduction : le changement de “sujet”. In Chevalier
J.C & M.F. Delport 1995. L'Horlogerie de Saint Jérome, Paris: L'Harmattan, 27–44.
Halverson, S. 1999. Conceptional work and the “translation”concept. Target 11, 1–31.
Halverson S. 2003. The cognitive basis of translation universals. Target 15:2, 197–241.
House, J. 2008. Beyond intervention: Universals in translation? Transkom 1 (1), 6–19.
Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the
Mind. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.
Laury R. Oblique mentions of human referents in Finnish conversation. In Helasvuo M.L.
and Campbell L. (eds) Grammar from the Human Perspective. Case, space and person in
Finnish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Olohan, M. 2004. Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. London, New York: Routledge.
60
Parrill, F. 2008. Subjects in the hands of speakers: An expérimental study of syntactic
subject and speech-gesture integration. Cognitive Linguistics 19 (2). 283-299.
Tymoczko, M. 1998. Computerized corpora and the future of translation studies, Meta 43
(4), 652–660.
61
Hützen, Nicole / Serbina, Tatiana:
German-English Contrasts: Thematic Progression in the Register of Popular Scientific
Writing
The general aim of popular-scientific writing is to make scientific information accessible
and comprehensible for a wider target audience. On the one hand knowledge is conveyed
in a simpler and more entertaining style to reach the general public, while on the other
hand scientific significance for readers with prior knowledge in the particular field is
maintained (Hyland 2009). This combination of both accessible knowledge and scientific
validity results in specific linguistic features characteristic of this register. The
development of popular scientific writing in German was influenced both by its English
counterpart and by the traditions of the German registers of academic writing and
journalism (Baumgarten 2008).
The present study compares the register of popular scientific discourse in English and
German within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday &
Matthiessen 2004). In this theory the notion of register is analysed according to the
perspectives of field, mode and tenor of discourse. Whereas mode and tenor focus on the
role of language, channel and medium as well as the relation between communicative
interactants, the investigation of the field of discourse involves analysis of the register’s
subject matter on the levels of lexis, grammatical patterns, conjunctive relations, etc. In
our study the field of discourse will be investigated with regard to lexico-grammatical
features which are characteristic of the popular scientific domain. Lexical chains have
been identified among possible concrete indicators for this register parameter: repetitions
of the same or related lexical items in the direct proximity from each other in one or
several texts reflect the importance of this lexical strategy for the subject matter handled
in the popular scientific register. The study of lexical chains provides insight into the way
explicit lexical cohesion supports the thematic progression of the texts.
Our research is based on contrastive register analysis (Neumann 2008). Features which
have been identified as indicators of the field of discourse will be first analysed in the
English and German subcorpora and then contrasted with the corresponding realisations.
It has been suggested that rather than performing a direct comparison between the
quantitative findings from individual languages, the deviations from the baseline of
comparison in each language should be taken into account. The results could be
compared, for instance, with the frequencies of the occurrence in the register-neutral
reference corpora. This allows us to account for possibly different functions of the same
feature in the two languages. This methodology – tested on two other registers in
Neumann (2008) – will be applied to the contrastive analysis of the register of popular
scientific writing. The quantitative analyses are based on the CroCo Corpus, which
62
includes texts from the popular scientific register in English and German (Hansen-Schirra
et al. 2012).
The results will contribute to the understanding of this complex register by determining
the relevant importance of the analysed features in both languages. Applications may
include insights into translation and translation quality assessment.
References
Baumgarten, N. 2008. "Writer construction in English and German popularized academic
discourse: The uses of we and wir". Multilingua 27: 409-438.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 2004. An Introduction to Functional
Grammar. London: Arnold.
Hansen-Schirra, S., S. Neumann & E. Steiner. 2012. Cross-linguistic Corpora for the
Study of Translations - Insights from the language pair English-German. Berlin: de
Gruyter Mouton.
Hyland, K. 2009. Academic discourse. London: Continuum.
Neumann, S. 2008. Contrastive register variation. A quantitative approach to the
comparison of English and German. Habilitationsschrift. Saarbrücken: Universität des
Saarlandes.
63
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A.:
Explicitation and Cognition: Triangulating Corpus and Experimental Studies
For over two decades, corpus-based and cognitive translation studies have popularized
empirical-descriptive research within the discipline. Scholars have stressed the need to
combine both paradigms (Halverson 2010) to gain insights into the cognitive foundation
for the general features of translated language. This paper responds to previous calls to
test explicitation phenomena on different translation modalities and types (Chesterman
2004: 47), including their cognitive basis (Halverson 2010, 2003). Methodologically it
departs from a study presented at UCCTS2 which confirmed that explicitation occurs in
cases in which brevity is required, viz. navigation menus in localized websites (JiménezCrespo 2011). The study proved that lexical units on localized websites were one average
more explicit that those found in non-localized websites in Spanish. It study found traces
of both obligatory and optional syntactic explication in the translation pair English –
Spanish. It also found longer average word counts for the lexical units on localized
navigation menus. The present study uses for triangulation and to construct the testing
instruments the comparable corpus and the dataset obtained in that study.
The objective of this new study is to test whether explicitation results from translationrelated cognitive processing related to “risk aversion” or other mechanisms might be
under play. For this purpose, three experimental groups of 50 translation students each
will be asked to either (1) translate a navigation menu without further instructions, (2)
translate the navigation menu with clear instructions related to the need to produce brief
renderings as they might not fit in the allotted space on screen and they might be
unusable, or (3) directly produce a navigation menu (i.e. write a word or phrase to be
place in a navigation menu for the option to get in ouch with the company). The results
will then be contrasted with the comparable corpora used in Jiménez-Crespo´s study. This
will shed light into whether the explicitation previously found might be due to
unconscious general cognitive processing related to translation (by means of contrasting
translated menus to those spontaneously produced), or whether this might be controlled if
attention is drawn to this general tendency and the need to be concise in this text type. In
this case, and in the words of Chesterman, it will also test whether once professional
translators are aware of these tendencies, they can “consciously chose to resist them”
(Chesterman 2004: 46).
References
Chesterman, A. (2004): “Beyond the particular.” In: A. Mauranen / P. Kujamäki (eds.),
Translation Universals: Do they Exist? Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 33-49.
64
Halverson, S. (2003): “The Cognitive Basis of Translation Universals.” In: Target 15:
197-241.
Halverson S. (2010): “Cognitive Translation Studies: Developments in Theory and
Method.” In: G. M. Shreve / E. Angelone (eds.), Translation and Cognition.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 349-369
Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. (2011): “The Future of General Tendencies in Translation:
Explicitation in Web Localization.” In: Target 23, 3–25.
65
Kajzer-Wietrzny, Marta:
Simplification in Translation and Interpreting
Simplification is one of the frequently hypothesized universals of translation. A seminal
corpus-based study of simplification was carried out by Laviosa (1998), who used English
Comparable Corpus (ECC) – a multi-source one million word monolingual comparable
corpus of translated English (newspaper articles and prose) and texts originally produced
in English. She discovered that irrespective of the source language the range of
vocabulary used in translation corpus is narrower, which is indicated by lower lexical
density, higher percentage of high frequency words and by the fact that list of a head of a
corpus of translated text accounts for a larger area of the corpus.
Laviosa’s (1998) methodology for the investigation of simplification as a universal feature
of translated texts based on lexical density and list head analyses was applied by Sandrelli
and Bendazzoli (2005), who tested the relevance of simplification hypothesis for
simultaneous interpreting. The study focused on the examination of sub-corpora of EPIC
(European Parliament Interpreting Corpus) i.e. subcorpora of interpreted English,
subcorpora of interpreted Italian and subcorpora of speeches originally produced in those
languages. The findings were, however, not exactly in line with Laviosa’s (1998)
observations.
Following this train of thought, the present study will employ Laviosa’s (1998)
methodology to examine whether translations and interpretations of the same source texts
into the same target language may display a similar tendency to simplification. Moreover,
to verify the “universality” of these tendencies, the analysis will involve translations and
interpretations into one target language (English) from four source languages (French,
German, Spanish and Dutch).
References
Laviosa, Sara. 1998. “Core patterns of lexical use in a comparable corpus of English
narrative prose”. Meta 43(4): 557-570
Sandrelli, Analisa / Claudio Bendazzoli. 2005. “Lexical patterns in simultaneous
interpreting: a preliminary investigation of EPIC (European Parliament Interpreting
Corpus)”, Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series, 1(1),
(www.corpus.bham.ac.uk/PCLC) (date of access: 15 Oct. 2009).
66
Karpova, Olga:
The Role of Semantic Fields in a Contrastive Study of Intensification and Evaluation
The present talk represents the results of a corpus-based research of intensification and
evaluation in adjectival and adverbial constructions, cf. in German mächtiger König
‘powerful king’ → mächtige Hitze ‘strong heat’ / sich mächtig freuen ‘to be very happy’,
elendes Leben ‘miserable life’ → elend kalt ‘very cold’, richtige Antwort ‘right answer’
→ richtig traurig ‘very sad’, enormes Haus ‘enormous house’ → enorm wichtig ‘very
important’, toller Hund ‘rabid dog’ → tolles Kleid ‘perfect dress‘, schiefe Wand ‘leaning
wall’ → schiefe Erklärung ‘bad explanation’, etc. In the focus of the discussion are the
mechanism of semantic change and the features of the phenomenon. I argue that this type
of polysemy is regular but its working principle can’t be interpreted as a standard
metaphor or metonymy (cf. Lakoff, Johnson 1980, Sweetser 1990, Croft 1993, Barcelona
2000, Radden 2000). Indeed, the semantic shifts in the examples above are not based on
contiguity or analogy but lead to the full or partial lose of cognitive connection between
the source and target meanings. I claim that semantic fields, i.e. conceptual categories, e.g.
AUTHORITY, PITY, TRUTH, SIZE, INSANITY, FORM, etc., play a crucial role in the
nature of the phenomenon (cf. Trier 1973, Weisberger 1962, Roget 1987). They include
specific implicatures, i.e. invited inferences that lead to the reanalysis of the initial
meaning and the development of the meanings in question (about implicatures and invited
inferences see Geis, Zwicky 1971, Levinson 2000, Traugott, Dasher 2002, Eckardt 2006).
Moreover, as my corpus-based historical research of a field FEAR in German revealed,
the phenomenon is gradual and semantic change in one lexeme of a field can motivate
activation of the process in other lexemes of the field. In this way, some fields can contain
more activated lexemes than other ones. Cross-linguistic comparison of the data gives us
supporting evidence of semantic fields from other languages. I furthermore consider
implicatures contained in semantic fields to be closely tied with cognitive and cultural
factors so that there are core semantic fields (fields that develop meanings of
intensification and evaluation in the majority of the languages) and culturally specific
ones.
References
Barcelona, Antonio (ed., 2000): Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: a Cognitive
Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Croft, William (1993): "The Role of Domains in the Interpretation of Metaphors and
Metonymies." In: Cognitive Linguistics 4, 335-370.
67
Eckardt, Regine (2006): Meaning Change in Grammaticalization: an Enquiry into
Semantic Reanalysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geis, Michael L. / Zwicky, Arnold M. (1971): "On Invited Inferences." In: Linguistic
Inquiry 2: 561-566.
Lakoff, George / Johnson, Mark (1980): Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press.
Levinson, Stephen (2000): Presumptive Meanings: the Theory of Generalized
Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Radden, Günter (2000): "How Metonymic are Metaphors?" In: Barcelona (ed.), 93-108.
Roget, Peter Mark (1987): Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. London:
Penguin.
Sweetser, Eve (1990): From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects
of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs / Dasher, Richard B. (2002): Regularity in Semantic Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trier, Joost (1931): Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes. Heidelberg:
Winter.
Weisgerber, Leo (1962): Grundzüge der Inhaltbezogenen Grammatik. Düsseldorf:
Schwann.
68
Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina / Kunz, Kerstin Anna / Krielke, Marie-Pauline
Anna:
Register Variation in Cohesive Reference: Evidence from a Multilingual Corpus
This paper focuses on the presentation and interpretation of findings of cohesive reference
drawn from our bilingual comparative corpus of originals. Our quantitative and qualitative
study aims at discussing contrasts in linguistic realisations between English and German.
It provides new empirical insights and differs from most other studies not only in its
bilingual character but also in the range of reference devices and functions covered, as
well as the corpus-based methods applied.
We first clarify our model of cohesive reference, which integrates various conceptualizations, based on Halliday & Hasan (1976) and Schreiber (1999), for a contrastive analysis
of English and German, also described in Steiner & Kunz (forthcoming). Furthermore,
major contrasts in the systemic resources of the two languages are presented to define the
linguistic items employed for co-reference and to disambiguate cohesive and noncohesive usage. We then demonstrate the semiautomatic annotation and extraction
procedures applied for the investigation of different cohesive types (personal,
demonstrative and comparative) as well as their lexico-grammatical functions (e.g. head
or modifier for demonstrative reference, particular or general reference for comparative
reference). We additionally distinguish exophoric and endophoric usage for those devices,
whose specific meanings highly depend on situational contexts and linguistic environments. The results from this fine-grained analysis permit quantitative as well as qualitative
interpretations of frequencies and functions, co-variations and meaning relations.
Our special interest lies in highlighting the register-dependent features of reference within
andacross languages. Our analyses convey different tendencies in the distribution and
multi-functionality of reference occurrences across registers. For instance, first results
(assessed on the English subcorpus) show that fictional and popular science texts have
different preferences in the type of reference used: personal reference predominates in
fiction (ca. 90% of the reference cases), whereas popular science demonstrates a more
balanced picture: 41% are personal, 31% are demonstrative, and 28% are comparative
reference. Altogether, distributions of reference are higher in fiction than in popular
science: 14% vs. 4% of all tokens in the analysed texts. This however, does not
necessarily imply that the register fiction is more cohesive, as popular science may realize
other cohesive strategies (e.g. lexical cohesion). Therefore, the contrasts identified for
reference are additionally interpreted in the light of contrasts found for other means of
cohesion such as conjunctive relations, substitution, ellipsis and lexical cohesion.
69
In our talk, we intend to demonstrate contrastive results for reference devices across
different registers in both languages under analysis. Our research thus offers a new
empirical view on the textual properties of English and German that are important for text
linguistics, contrastive grammars and translation studies. Moreover, our findings will find
application in teaching (both language learning or translator training) and NLP studies
(e.g. machine translation).
References
Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London, New York:
Longman.
Kunz, K. & Steiner, E. (forthcoming). Towards a comparison of cohesive reference in
English and German: System and text. In: Contrastive Discourse Analysis. Functional and
Corpus Perspectives. M. Taboada, S. Doval Suárez & E. González Álvarez (eds.),
London: Equinox.
Schreiber, M. (1999). Textgrammatik - Gesprochene Sprache - Sprachvergleich.
Proformen im im gesprochenen Französischen und Deutschen. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang.
70
Lavid, Julia / Moratón, Lara:
Investigating the Automated Annotation of Thematic Features in English and Spanish
While automatic annotation of lower levels of linguistic processing has been achieved
with a reasonable degree of accuracy with computational systems such as part-of-speech
taggers and parsers, the task of automating the annotation of higher levels of linguistic
processing (e.g., semantic, pragmatic, or discourse categories) for use in applications such
as information extraction, information retrieval, automated text summarization, or
machine translation, among others, is a complex one. It requires manual or semiautomatic annotation first, to produce a small corpus with high-quality human-coded
annotations on which computer algorithms can be trained. This method has been
successfully used in numerous annotation projects, such as CONTRANOT (Lavid 2012a)
and the more recent MULTINOT (Lavid 2012b) where the present work is being carried
out. Although human-coded annotations can be costly and time-consuming, requiring
reliable annotation procedures to ensure the quality of the annotated data (Hovy and Lavid
2010; Reidsma and Carletta 2008), they can provide an accurate representation of the
complexity of certain thematic features and can be semi-automated through available
annotation tools such as GATE (Cunningham et al 2002).
In the case of the category of Thematisation, there has been an attempt at automatically
identifying Theme in English on the basis of its syntactic realization (see Swartz et al.),
but the approach, though valid for simple Theme, has limitations in the identification of
multiple Themes and the parsing of complex sentences, and has not been applied to other
languages such as Spanish with a richer morphology than English.In this paper we
investigate how to integrate both automatic and hand-coded methods in the contrastive
annotation of thematic features in English and Spanish, as part of the work carried out
within the framework of the Multinot project. In the first phase of the work we are
automatically annotating a training corpus of English newspaper texts using available
tools for tokenisation, POS-tagging and parsing in this language, and are now working on
problems encountered with available tools for Spanish. In the second phase of the work,
we are developing annotation schemes for thematic options in both languages and handcoding our training corpus using the GATE platform (Cunningham et al 2002). The paper
reports on the problems and challenges occurring in both phases of the annotation process
and analyses their impact on the contrastive analysis and annotation of thematisation in
English and Spanish.
References
Cunningham, H., Maynard, D., Bontcheva, K. 2002.. GATE: A Framework and Graphical
Development Environment for Robust NLP Tools and Applications. Proceedings of the
71
40th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'02).
Philadelphia.
Hovy, Eduard, and Lavid, Julia. 2010. Towards a science of corpus annotation: a new
methodological challenges for Corpus Linguistics. International Journal of Translation
22(1): 13-36.
Lavid, J. 2012a. Corpus analysis and annotation in CONTRANOT: Linguistic and
Methodological Challenges. In Encoding the past, decoding the future: corpora in the 21st
century, Isabel Moskowich and Begoña Crespo (eds), 205-220. Cambridge: Cambridge
Scholar Publ.
Lavid, J. 2012b. Towards a richly-annotated and register-controlled bilingual (EnglishSpanish) textual database for contrastive linguistic and translation research. Paper
presented at ICAME 2012, Workshop 2: Corpus-based contrastive analysis. University of
Leuven, 30 May 2012.
Reidsma, D. and J. Carletta. 2008. Reliability measurement without limits, Computational
Linguistics 34/3, 319–326.
Swartz, L., Bartsch, S., Eckart, R., Teich, E. 2008. Exploring automatic Theme
identification: A rule-based approach. In Text Resources and Lexical Knowledge:
Selected Papers from the 9th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS),
15-26.
72
Lecuit, Emeline / Maurel, Denis / Vitas, Dusko:
Oblique Translation of Proper Names
It has often been claimed that proper names should never be translated when transferred
from a source-language into a target-language. This impossibility to translate proper
names is even considered as one of their less infallible criteria of description for authors
like Witold Mańczak (1988:60). In 1958, Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet were the
first authors to establish a list of translation procedures translators could choose between
when translating a source-text into a target-text. They distinguished between two categories of procedures, the ones they qualified as ‘direct (literal) translation procedures’, and
the others qualified as ‘indirect (oblique) translation procedures’. They also explained that
the literal procedures were to be privileged and that “literalness should only be sacrificed
because of structural and metalinguistic requirements and only after checking that the
meaning is fully preserved” (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1995:34-35). When reading accounts
made on proper names translation, it appears that many authors insist on the fact that
proper names should only be translated using direct translation procedures. We created a
parallel multilingual corpus, made of eleven different versions, i.e. in ten different
languages, of the same novel by Jules Verne, Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, to
try and answer this question: do proper names only obey to direct translation procedures,
or can they also undergo indirect translation procedures?
The reason we chose this text is that it is available in a great number of languages and that
it contains not less than 3,415 proper names, covering all categories of proper names:
anthroponyms (referring to human beings and assimilated entities), toponyms (referring to
place names), ergonyms (referring to human productions), pragmonyms (referring to
natural and historical events). Our selection of languages to be represented in the corpus is
quite representative of the European linguistic landscape as it contains versions in French,
Bulgarian, Serbian, Polish, German, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Greek. The
results appear to be as follows:
• most proper names are translated using one of the direct translation procedures (i.e.
either, borrowing, calque or literal translation) in all the languages observed;
• in all the languages observed, a non-negligible proportion of proper names are translated
using other, indirect, procedures of all sorts.
These procedures imply the use in the target-language of three kinds of equivalents:
• a formal equivalent, i.e. a derivative,
73
• a semantic/cultural/pragmatic equivalent (another proper name used as an equivalent),
• the use of an equivalent syntactical structure.
BUL
ELL
ENG1
ENG2
GER
ITA
POL
POR
SPA
SRP
1,2%
0,1%
0,3%
0,2%
0,7%
0,4%
1,1%
0,1%
0,1%
1,6%
1,2%
1,7%
6,3%
7,2%
1,8%
1,5%
2,7%
0,9%
2,1%
1,3%
2,3%
1,8%
13,3%
6,1%
4,1%
0,6%
9,8%
0,4%
4,0%
1,2%
TOTAL
syntactical equivalent
formal equivalent
semantic/cultural/pragmati
c equivalent
We will present examples of the different procedures observed on the corpus: transpositions, explicitations, reductions, uses of an alias, modulations, embeddings, pronominalisations, uses of periphrases and omissions.
4,6%
3,6%
19,9%
13,5%
6,6%
2,5%
13,6%
1,3%
6,1%
4,1%
Table 1: Oblique translation procedures (results)
References
Mańczak, W. Critères de vérité. Leurs conséquences pour la linguistique. Langages, 1988,
23, pp. 51-64.
Vinay, J.-P. / Darbelnet, J. Comparative Stylistics of French and English (trans. and ed.
Bu Juan C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995.
74
Lefer, Marie-Aude / Dal, Georgette / Grabar, Natalia:
Genre Variation in Translation Corpora: Evaluative Prefixation in TED Talks and Parliamentary Debates
Several scholars have recently emphasized the need to explore variation across registers,
genres and domains in corpus-based contrastive and translation studies. Johansson (2007:
304), for example, argues that “it is desirable to extend contrastive studies by taking into
account the variation across registers within languages.” Similarly, Olohan (2004: 191)
states that “we need to recognize that a substantial part of translation activity in the world
involves non-literary texts. If we are to study the activity of translation and translation
process generally, we need to delve deeper into those genres and texts too. This will have
the consequence that we will be able to make more cross-genre comparisons and study the
extent to which features of translation may be influenced by genre, text type, etc.”
However, in contrastive and translation studies based on translation corpora, the emphasis
has mainly been on literary genres (such as novels) and relatively few studies have
examined cross-genre variation (notable exceptions are Altenberg, 2004/2005; Cosme,
2006; Neumann, 2008; De Sutter et al., 2012). The present paper aims to contribute to this
emerging body of corpus-based research and addresses the issue of genre variation in the
field of contrastive word-formation. This will be done by examining English and French
evaluative prefixation (e.g. En. extra-high, hyper-innovative, mini-victory, outperform)
across two genres: talks and parliamentary debates. In fact, such variationist approaches
are essential in word-formation studies, as word-formation is highly register-, genre- and
domain-sensitive. As shown by Plag et al. (1999), for example, the use and productivity of
English suffixes greatly vary across speech and writing (see Grabar et al., 2006; Chmielik
& Grabar, 2011; Lefer, 2012 for similar findings about French).
Evaluative morphology has been extensively discussed in morphological typology (cf.
Stump, 1993; Bauer, 1997; Grandi & Montermini, 2005; Körtvélyessy & Stekauer, 2011).
Corpus-based contrastive descriptions of evaluative morphology, however, are still sorely
lacking for many language pairs (see Andor, 2005), including English and French.
Available descriptions of evaluative prefixation, which is the main focus of this paper,
show that prefixes can be classified along the following two dimensions (see Wierzbicka,
1991; Grandi, 2002; Fradin & Montermini, 2009; the sub-categories are taken from
Cartoni, 2008: 287-291):
Quantity dimension with a maximum/minimum axis (so-called ‘measurativity’) and the
two semantic values ‘BIG’ and ‘SMALL’:
‘BIG’: increase, abundance (hyper-, macro-, maxi-, mega-, super-)
75
-
-
‘SMALL’: decrease, attenuation, approximation (micro-, mini-; semi-, quasi-,
pseudo-) Quality dimension with a positive/negative axis (so-called ‘appreciativity’) and the two semantic values ‘GOOD’ and ‘BAD’:
‘GOOD’: excess (excessive degree), superiority (higher rank) (extra-, hyper-,
mega-, out-, over-, super-, ultra-)
‘BAD’: lack, inferiority (lower rank) (hypo-, under-, sub-)
The present study relies on EnglishSL-FrenchTL bilingual data extracted from two
translation corpora, which together total 20+ million words: the Europarl corpus of
parliamentary debates (Koehn, 2005; Cartoni & Meyer, 2012) and WIT^3 (Web Inventory
of Transcribed and Translated Talks, TED talks; Cettolo et al., 2012). Both corpora have
been aligned at word-level by relying on a tailor-made alignment programme combined
with Giza++ (Och & Ney, 2000) so as to facilitate the automatic extraction of translation
equivalent pairs. Our talk will focus on the impact of genre variation on (1) evaluative
prefixation in English source texts (in terms of type/token frequencies, word categories,
base words, semantics: qualitative vs quantitative evaluation) and (2) the translation
equivalents used in French target texts. The French equivalents will be classified into the
following two categories: incongruent translations (single words, e.g. out-compete supplanter; and periphrastic translations, e.g. over-bureaucratic - excessivement bureaucratique) and congruent translations (evaluative prefixation, e.g. semi-wild - semisauvage, underfunded - sous-financé). The corpus-based analysis will make it possible to
measure the impact of genre on the word-formation features of both source and target
texts and determine to what extent translation strategies are genre-dependent.
References
Altenberg B. (2004/2005). The generic person in English and Swedish. A contrastive
study of one and man. Languages in Contrast, 5(1): 93-120.
Andor J. (2005). A Lexical Semantic-Pragmatic Analysis of the Meaning Potentials of
Amplifying Prefixes in English and Hungarian. A Corpus-based Case Study of Near
Synonymy. In Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series, 1(1).
Available online: http://www.corpus.bham. ac.uk/PCLC/
Bauer L. (1997). Evaluative Morphology: In Search of Universals. Studies in Language,
21(3): 533-575.
Cartoni B. (2008). De l'incomplétude lexicale en traduction automatique : vers une
approche morphosémantique multilingue. PhD thesis. Université de Genève: Genève.
76
Cartoni B. & T. Meyer (2012). Extracting Directional and Comparable Corpora from a
Multilingual Corpus for Translation Studies. In Proceedings of the 8th International
Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), May 2012, Istanbul, Turkey.
Cettolo M., C. Girardi & M. Federico (2012). WIT3: Web Inventory of Transcribed and
Translated Talks. In Proceedings of EAMT, Trento, Italy, 261-268.
Chmielik J. & N. Grabar (2011). Détection de la spécialisation scientifique et technique
des documents biomédicaux grâce aux informations morphologiques. TAL, 52(2): 151179.
Cosme C. (2006). Clause combining across languages. A corpus-based study of EnglishFrench translation shifts. Languages in Contrast, 6(1): 71-108.
De Sutter G., I. Delaere & K. Plevoets (2012). Lexical lectometry in corpus-based
translation studies. Combining profile-based correspondence analysis and logistic
regression modelling. In M. Oakes & J. Meng (eds) Quantitative Methods in CorpusBased Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fradin B. & F. Montermini (2009). La morphologie évaluative. In B. Fradin, F. Kerleroux
& M. Plénat (eds) Aperçus de morphologie du français. Saint Denis: PUV, 231-266.
Grabar N., D. Tribout, G. Dal, B. Fradin, N. Hathout, S. Lignon, F. Namer, C. Plancq, F.
Yvon & P. Zweigenbaum (2006). Productivité quantitative des suffixations par -ité et able dans un corpus journalistique moderne. In Proceedings of TALN 2006 conference,
Leuven, Belgium.
Grandi N. (2002). Morfologie in contatto. Le costruzioni valutative nelle lingue del
Mediterraneo. Milan: FrancoAngeli.
Grandi N. & F. Montermini (2005). Prefix-Suffix Neutrality In Evaluative Morphology.
In G. Booij, E. Guevara, A. Ralli, S. Sgroi & S. Scalise (eds) Morphology and Linguistic
Typology. Online Proceedings of the Fourth Mediterranean Morphology Meeting
(MMM4), September 2003, Catania, University of Bologna, 2005, 143-156.
Johansson S. (2007). Seeing through Multilingual Corpora. On the use of corpora in
contrastive studies. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Koehn P. (2005). Europarl: A Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation. In
Proceedings of MT Summit X, 79-86.
77
Körtvélyessy L. & P. Stekauer (eds) (2011). Diminutives and Augmentatives in the
Languages of the World. Lexis, 6.
Lefer M.-A. (2012). La préfixation française à travers les genres et les domaines : étude de
corpus. In Proceedings of the 'Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française' (CMLF 2012),
1325-1349.
Neumann S. (2008). Contrastive Register Variation. A quantitative approach to the
comparison of English and German. Habilitationsschrift. Universität des Saarlandes.
Och F.J. & H. Ney (2000). Improved Statistical Alignment Models. In Proceedings of
ACL, 440-447.
Olohan, M. (2004). Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. London: Routledge.
Plag I., C. Dalton-Puffer & H. Baayen (1999). Morphological productivity across speech
and writing. English Language and Linguistics, 3(2): 209-228.
Stump G. T. (1993). How peculiar is evaluative morphology? Journal of Linguistics, 29:
1-36.
Wierzbicka A. (1991). Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human interaction.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
78
Leuschner, Torsten (in collaboration with Daan Van den Nest):
Asynchronous Grammaticalization: An Historical-Contrastive Approach to V1-Conditionals in English and German
In a recent paper, König (2012) calls for collaboration between contrastive analysis and
historical-comparative linguistics over cognate and/or functionally equivalent constructions in two languages of the same family which appear to represent consecutive stages
along the same path of grammaticalization. Such constructions and their grammaticalization processes are called "asynchronous" here. The present paper reports on research in
which the case for collaboration is put to the test with regard to V1-conditionals in
English (1) and German (2):
(1) Should you change your mind, no one would blame you.
(2) Kommt Karl, (dann) gehe ich.
The impression of asynchronicity arises because English V1-protases are characterised
(inter alia) by a severely reduced paradigmatic variability in lexical and morphological/
functional terms compared with their German counterparts, thus apparently representing a
more advanced stage of grammaticalization. The present paper paper tests this hypothesis
using a panchronic, corpus-based methodology with reference to two parameters of
variation, viz. finite protasis verbs and sequence of tenses, from Old English and Old High
German through present-day English and German.
The results show that the grammaticalization of V1-conditionals has been a relatively onesided affair which affected English much more than German in terms of both quantity
(viz. rate of change) and quality. Having developed a restrictive functional niche early,
English V1-conditionals became even more restricted in the course of their history,
turning their functional limitations into structural restrictions while also being caught up
in large-scale developments of English grammar which further enhanced the already
significant differences with German. As a result, resemblances between synchronic contrasts and diachronic stages are more limited than a purely synchronic contrastive analysis
leads us to expect, and V1-conditionals turn out above all to illustrate the English
"Sonderweg" within Germanic.
König, Ekkehard (2012): "Comparative Linguistics and Language Comparison." In:
Languages in Contrast 12, 3-26.
79
Lin, Yen-Han / Hsieh, Shelley Ching-Yu:
Comparison between Mandarin Chinese and English Synaesthestic Metaphors: Body,
Emotion, and Languages in Harry Potter
Synaesthetic metaphor is the usage of words, connected with one sphere of sensation to
express senses and feelings of another sphere of sensorium, e.g., a warm voice, soft light.
This study investigates synaesthetic metaphors in Mandarin Chinese and English with the
data taken from a widely translated piece of fantasy literature, Harry Potter. Through the
mappings from one sensory modality to another, expressions are understood via figurative
bodily images (Wierzbicka, 1999b), and other cognitive mechanisms. Our analysis draws
on the synaesthetic schemas proposed by Williams (1976) and Lien (1994). The goals are
(a) how synaesthetic transfers are used in Mandarin Chinese and English in Harry Potter;
(b) in what way embodiment is situated in such cognitive usage; (c) in what way language
diversity and universality exist in synaesthetic transfer.
The findings show that, first, dimension and touch are not as isolated as Williams (1976)
proposed. Instead, there are connection moves from dimension to touch, which is pointed
out by Lien (1994) as well when he conducted his research of synaesthetic transfers in the
Southern Min dialect.
(1)
touch > sound
a.
sharp voice (Vol. I, p. 116, Harry Potter)
b.
dry, wheezy voice (II, 124)
c.
cold fury in her voice (I, 177)
Second, the usages of tactile lexicons occur more in English than in Mandarin Chinese.
For example, the tactile modifier in English not only provides the pitch for the sound as in
(1a), but also tells its quality as in (1b); i.e., the transfer in (1) moves from touch to sound.
The role that taste plays in both languages is different. In Mandarin Chinese, 14%
synaesthetic metaphors radiates from gustatory experience while there is only 3% in English. This diversity is an outcome of culture. Chinese people value diet earnestly (min2 yi3
shi2 wei2 tian1 民以食為天 ‘people take eating as life’). This cognitive concept also
reflects to language usages and is supported by synaesthetic mappings.
Third, the preference ranking of source domains in Mandarin Chinese is dimension, touch,
and emotion; while it is touch, dimension, and emotion in English. Interestingly, in both
languages, dimension plays a great role in the source domain but no synaesthetic transfers
go to dimension. The possible reasons might due to human physical development and the
rule of mapping direction. Since dimension is one of the major sources in both languages,
the backward transfers are against the rule of unidirection. Furthermore, even though
80
dimension is not as concrete as tactile experience, it could be regarded as the most
important visual experience in infancy (Sweetser, 1990). It is an early developed sensory
modality and has higher chance to serve as the source rather than target in terms of metaphorical mappings.
In sum, embodiment shows in cognition and language pervasively. Through the analysis
of synaesthetic transfers of Mandarin Chinese and English in Harry Potter, we see the
interaction between body and culture where bodily experience provides the universal
frame for mapping routes and cultural shaped the diversity across languages. Synaesthetic
metaphor is a linguistic performance which gives the opportunity to observe some
regularities of human cognition.
References
Lien, Chin-Fa (連金發). (1994). Synaesthetic words in the southern Min dialects: Their
structure and change. In J. K. Li, C. R Huang, & C. C. Jane Tang (Eds.), Symposium
series of the institute of history and philology, No. 2: Chinese languages and linguistics II.
Historical Linguistics (pp. 421-451). Taipei: The Institute of History and Philology,
Academia Sinica.
Sweetser, E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of
semantic structure. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ullmann, S. (1959). The principle of semantics (2nd ed.). Glasgow: Jackson.
Wierzbicka, A. (1999b). Emotional universals. Language Design, 2, 23-69.
81
Linn, Stella:
French Urban Youth Language: Problems of Translation and Identity
Following the ground-breaking work of scholars such as Labov, Gumperz and Lodge,
youth language has become an increasingly popular research topic in sociolinguistics,
although the number of studies tends to vary according to national interest. French urban
youth vernacular or français contemporain des cités (FCC) is a remarkable case in point
for several reasons. Firstly, the ‘ideology of the standard’ is deeply ingrained in French
society, which has led to a hostile attitude by the establishment, and educational
authorities in particular, towards speakers of this non-standard variety. This rejection,
which is very apparent even today, has in turn led to a provocative reaction from French
adolescents (see, for example, Gumperz’s notion of ‘they-code’). Their rebellion not only
manifests itself in society through such means as the use of violence, sometimes ending in
riots, and chosen unemployment, but also at a linguistic level, since the speakers use
violation of the linguistic norms as a means of subversion. This brings us to the second
interesting aspect of FCC: its linguistic characteristics. On the lexical level, FCC is
strongly influenced by several migrant languages spoken by the first generation of
immigrants, mostly Arabic, but American English is also an important source of input.
The most significant morphological feature is the use of verlan, a kind of backslang based
on syllabic inversion that can be applied recurrently so as to heighten its coding function.
Being firstly an oral language, FCC is only beginning to appear in literature, mostly in
novels by young immigrant authors such as Faïza Guène, Mohammed Razane and Rachid
Djaïdani. Thus, translation of these texts is called for, but this raises a number of issues.
For example, if we assume that the social functions of youth language will vary according
to culture and that its linguistic features in French may not exist in other languages, what
are the implications for translation? In what way will the relationship between language
use and identity affect the target text? What options do translators have, and what are the
consequences of such decisions? Is it possible to compensate for losses? I will draw on a
small corpus of French novels that have been recently translated into Dutch (and possibly
other languages) in an attempt to answer these questions and will also address some
methodological issues.
References
Doran, Meredith (2004): "Negotiating between Bourge and Racaille: Verlan as Youth
Identity Practice in Suburban Paris." In: Pavleta, Aneta / Adrian Blackledge (eds.),
Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts. Frankfurt etc.: Multilingual Matters,
93-124.
82
Goudaillier, J.-P. (2009): "Pratiques langagières et linguistiques révélatrices des pratiques
sociales de jeunes résidant en Z.U.S." In: Adolescence 4 no. 70, 849-857. URL: http://
www.cairn.info.proxy-ub.rug.nl/revue-adolescence-2009-4-page-849.htm [01.10.2012]
Lane-Mercier, Gillian (1997): "Translating the Untranslatable: the Translator’s Aesthetic,
Ideological and Political Responsibility." In: Target 9, 43-48.
Lodge, R.-A. (1991): "Authority, Prescriptivism and the French Standard Language." In:
Journal of French Language Studies 1, 93-111.
Pooley, Tim (2006): "Analyzing Urban Youth Vernaculars in French Cities:
Lexicographical, Variationist and Ethnographic Approaches." In: Ayoun, Dalila (ed.),
Studies in French Applied Linguistics. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Benjamins, 317-344.
83
Loock, Rudy / De Sutter, Gert / Plevoets, Koen:
Teasing Apart Translation Universals and Source-Language Interference: a Case Study
on Derived Adverbs in English and French
The aim of this presentation is to provide a corpus-based analysis of English derived
adverbs in -ly (properly, honestly) vs. French derived adverbs in -ment (proprement,
honnêtement), generally presented as a case of translational equivalence, leaving lexical
gaps and false cognates aside. Through the exploitation of comparable corpora of nontranslated language (British National Corpus, COCA for English; Frantext for French) and
translated language (Translational English corpus for English, CorTEx corpus for French),
we first show that there are extremely significant inter-language and intra-language
differences in the use of such derived adverbs in contemporary fiction texts, with a much
higher frequency of -ly adverbs in non-translated English in comparison with -ment
adverbs in non-translated French, while translated English (from French) shows a lower
frequency of -ly adverbs than non-translated English, and translated French (from English)
shows a higher frequency of -ment adverbs.
These results, in line with many studies within the CBTS framework, are problematic as
far as their interpretation is concerned. In the literature two types of explanations have
been provided to account for intra-language differences: (i) translation universals (Baker
1993, 1995, 1996; Tirkkonen-Condit 2002) such as explicitation, normalization, unique
items hypothesis, or (ii) source-language interference leading to translationese. While the
majority of studies have opted for the explanation through translation universals (e.g.
Baker & Olohan 2000, Olohan 2003, Laviosa 1997, 1998, Xiao 2010, Jimenez-Crespo
2010), others have decided that such intra-language differences are actually the sign of
translations that do not respect the usage constraints of the target language and can therefore be improved (e.g. Loock 2010, Rabadán et al. 2009).
With this presentation, we aim to check whether it is possible to tease apart the two types
of explanation for the intra-language results obtained for derived adverbs in English and
French, which seem to suggest a case of source-language interference. To do so, we
explore data from other languages to shed light on the French-English results, and also
narrow the corpus-based study down to only those adverbs that have direct translational
equivalences in the other language (finalement/ finally; immédiatement/immediately) as
opposed to the other adverbs for which such direct equivalences do not exist for morphological (successfully, increasingly) or semantic reasons (actually/actuellement; equally/
également).
84
References
Baker, M., Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications, in
Baker, M. et al. (eds), Text and Technology, Philadelphia/Amsterdam, John Benjamins,
1993, 233-250.
Baker, M., Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some Suggestions for
Future Research, Target, 1995, 7(2), 223-243.
Baker, M., Corpus-based translation studies: The challenges that lie ahead, in Somers, H.
(ed), Terminology, LSP and Translation. Studies in language engineering in honour of
Juan C. Sager, Philadelphia/Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 1996, 175-186.
Baker, M. et Olohan, M., Reporting that in Translated English: Evidence for
Subconscious Processes of Explicitation?, Across Languages and Cultures, 2000, 1(2),
141-158.
Jiménez-Crespo, M. A., The future of “universal” tendencies: a review of papers using
localized websites, Communication au colloque international UCCTS 2010, Edge Hill
University, U.K., 27-29 juillet 2010.
Laviosa-Braithwaite, S., Investigating Simplification in an English Comparable Corpus of
Newspaper Articles, in Klaudy, K. et Kohn, J. (eds.), Transferre Necesse Est. Proceedings
of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and
Interpreting, 5-7 septembre, 1996, Budapest, Scholastica, 1997, 531-540.
Laviosa, S., Core Patterns of Lexical Use in a Comparable Corpus of English Narrative
Prose, Meta, 1998, 43(4), 557-570.
Loock, R., Using corpora to define target-language use in translation, Paper given at
UCCTS 2010, Edge Hill University, United Kingdom, July 2010.
Loock, R. Doit-il/Peut-il y avoir homogénéisation entre langue originale et langue traduite
? To appear in Palimpsestes 26, 2013.
Olohan, Maeve (2003): How frequent are the contractions? Target. 15(1): 59-89.
Rabadán, R., Labrador, B. et Ramon, N. Corpus-based contrastive analysis and translation
universals. A tool for translation quality assessment English-Spanish. Babel, 2009, 55(4),
303-328.
85
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja. 2002. “Translationese — a myth or an empirical fact? A study
into the linguistic identifiability of translated language”. Target 14:2, 207–220.
Xiao, Richard (2010): How different is translated Chinese from native Chinese? A corpusbased study of translation universals. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 15(1):
5-35.
86
Menzel, Katrin:
Cohesive Ellipsis and Its Varieties in Registers of Spoken and Written Language: a
Corpus-Based Approach with a Contrastive Focus on English and German
Ellipsis is a frequently used narrative device and a highly pervasive phenomenon in
natural language. It is very typical for spoken language and in situations where
interlocutors share a high level of common knowledge. On the other hand, it can also
create ambiguity and suspense. Different disciplines, such as theoretical linguistics,
computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics have tried to describe
this phenomenon from their perspectives. There is a growing interest in quantitative
methods to trace ellipsis automatically. Some researchers, focussing mainly on VP-ellipsis
or other specific subcategories, have tried to annotate the phenomenon automatically. For
example, ellipsis resolution algorithms are relevant for machine translation when the
source language does not express something which the target language must express.
Although ellipsis has been studied extensively since Quintilian’s writings on ellipsis as a
rhetorical devise, its full range of functions has largely remained a mystery. It is a rather
tricky and sophisticated structure with various subtypes and borderline cases.
This study is embedded in a DFG-funded project about an empirically-based investigation
of cohesion in English and German. Therefore in my paper, I intend to focus particularly
on ellipses with anaphoric or cataphoric cross-clausal function. A clear-cut distinction of
cohesive ellipsis from other types of ellipsis with different functions and other
fragmentary elements of languages, e.g. anacolutha, seems necessary. So far, ellipsis as a
cohesive devise has been less studied than other cohesive phenomena, probably due to its
complexity and fuzziness. Additionally, automatic extraction of evidence for ellipsis from
corpora proves challenging.
This paper is an attempt to address this research gap by reviewing the scope of the
definition of ellipsis and integrating the concept in the framework of a systemic analysis
on German and English grammar. Trends and relationships shall be investigated with
regard to the following variables: English vs. German, spoken vs. written. This is a
corpus-based study aiming to obtain methodological and empirical results. Our multilayer
annotated corpus provides a significant collection of English and German texts of real
language in many different registers along the written / spoken continuum. Query results
might be compared with data from other corpora. A quantitative method to trace ellipses
automatically in language corpora shall be presented. Formulating certain triggers of
ellipsis will help to design CQP-based queries to find potential cases. We also intend to
explore quantitatively whether there are typical registers containing a greater variety of
cohesive ellipses than others. This research should lead to a general description of the way
87
in which ellipsis contributes to text cohesion, based on empirical findings and crosslinguistic comparison.
References
Biber, D. / S. Conrad / R. Reppen (1998): Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language
Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K / R. Hasan (1976): Cohesion in English. London: Longman..
Kunz, K. / E. Lapshinova-Koltunski / M. Amoia (2011): "Tools to Analyse GermanEnglish Contrasts in Cohesion. In Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications."
In: Hedeland, H. / Schmidt, T. / K. Wörner (eds), Proceedings of the Conference of the
German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL) 2011.
Hamburg Univ., 243-246.
Kunz, K. / Steiner, E. (forthcoming): Towards a Comparison of Cohesive Reference in
English and German: System and text. In: Maite Taboada / Susanna Doval Suárez / Elsa
González Álvarez (eds.), Contrastive Discourse Analysis: Functional and Corpus
Perspectives. London: Equinox.
Merchant, J. (2004): "Fragments and Ellipsis." In: Linguistics and Philosophy 27, 661738.
Quintilianus, M. F. (1965): M. Fabi Qvintiliani institvtionis oratoriae libri XII. Ed.
Ludwig Radermacher. Leipzig: Teubner.
Wilson, P. (2000): Mind the Gap: Ellipsis and Stylistic Variation in Spoken and Written
English. Harlow: Longman.
88
Milićević, Jasmina / Catena, Angels:
Contrasting Serbian and Catalan Clitics: What This Can Tell Us about the Nature of Both
Languages
We report on a contrastive study of Serbian and Catalan clitics, conducted within the
dependency framework of Meaning-Text theory (Mel’čuk 2009) and geared towards
machine translation. We focus on syntactic mismatches (e.g., Dorr 1994; Mel’čuk &
Wanner 2006), i.e., non-trivial correspondences between syntactic structures that underlie
equivalent Serbian and Catalan sentences featuring clitics.
To our knowledge, this is the first comparison of a second-position clitic system (Serbian)
and an adverbal clitic system (Catalan) within a dependency framework, and the first
dependency-oriented account of Catalan clitics, abundantly described within phrasestructure syntax, e.g., in Solà (2002) and Bonet & Lloret (2005); dependency-based
accounts of Serbian clitics are found, e.g., in Čamdžić & Hudson (2002) and Milićević
(2009).
Here is an example of a mismatch involving clitics, taken from a parallel corpus consisting of a Serbian novel and its Catalan translation:
(1) a. Ponudiše gaACC votkomINSTR. ‘[They] treated him with.vodka’.
‘To.him [they] offered vodka’.
b. LiDAT van oferir vodka.
While the Serbian verb takes the Recipient as the DirO, for its Catalan equivalent the
same complement is an IndirO, which results in different case assignment to the clitics.
Moreover, in the Catalan sentence, the IndirO clitic is raised to the auxiliary and linearly
positioned with respect to it. The surface-syntactic structures of sentences (1) follow (the
subject node is elided in both structures, Serbian and Catalan being PRO-drop languages):
(2) a.
PONUDITIACT, IND, AORIST
subjectival
——
indir-objectival
ANARIND, PRES
subjectival
auxiliary
OFERIRINF
——
dir-objectival
VOTKASG
ON
b.
indir-objectival
ELL
dir-objectival
VODKASG
Such mismatches are not exclusively related to or triggered by clitics: since clitics are
“pro-words,” substitute elements par excellence, interlinguistic mismatches between them
can only be symptomatic of discrepancies happening at deeper representation levels,
where clitics do not appear at all. But due to their obligatoriness and concomitant high
89
frequency in texts, clitics make the mismatches in which they are featured “fly in your
face,” and so help reveal some general features of the languages compared. Thus, we were
able to observe interesting differences between Serbian and Catalan, concerning
pronominalization patterns, obligatory/optional implementation of actants, allowed
government pattern alternations, preferences for possessor raising, preferences for the use
of verbal voices, etc. In this talk, we present our findings and suggest a way to resolve
some clitic-involving mismatches.
In the above case, the mismatch is resolved at the deep-syntactic representation level. The
deep-syntactic structure is a cross-linguistically valid, generalized representation of the
sentence organization, where differences between individual languages are maximally
reduced, and where, under translation, the transfer is performed; cf. the DSynSs of
sentences (1):
(3) a.
PONUDITIACT, IND, AORIST
I
L1(N) PL
L2(N, masc), SG
b.
OFERIRACT, IND, PAST
I
III
II
L21(N) PL
II
VOTKASG
III
L2 (N, masc), SG
VODKASG
The analysis of (2a), which, crucially, uses the Government Pattern of PONUDITI, yields
(3a), with the sources of pronominal elements, noted L(exeme)1 and L(exeme)2, partially
reconstructed (the full reconstruction requires looking up contextual information). Then, it
suffices to match PONUDITI with OFERIR and let the rules of Catalan construct (3b), using
the Government Pattern of OFERIR.
GP OF PONUDITI
X=I
Y=
Z = II
III
NNOM NINSTR
NACC
X=I
N
GP OF OFERIR
Y = II
Z = III
N
a N; PronCLIT,
DAT
References
Bonet Eulàlia & Lloret Maria-Rosa, 2005, More on Alignment as an Alternative to
Domains: The Syllabification of Catalan Clitics, Probus, International Journal of Latin
and Romance Linguistics 17/1: 37-78.
90
Dorr Bonnie, 1994, Machine Translation Divergences: A Formal Description and
Proposed Solution, Computational Linguistics 20/4; 579-633.
Čamdžić Aneta & Hudson Richard, 2002, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian Clitics and Word
Grammar. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14: 321-353.
Mel’čuk Igor 2009, Dependency in Natural Language, in Mel’čuk, I. & Polguère, A., eds,
Dependency in Linguistic Description, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 1-110.
Mel’čuk Igor & Wanner Leo, 2006, Syntactic Mismatches in Machine Translation,
Machine Translation 20/2: 81-138.
Milićević Jasmina, 2009, Linear Placement of Serbian Clitics in a Syntactic Dependency
Framework, in Mel’čuk, I. & Polguère, A., eds, Dependency in Linguistic Description,
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 235-277.
Solà Jaume, 2002, Clitic Climbing and Null Subject Languages, Catalan Journal of
Linguistics 1: 225-255.
Parallel Corpus
KIŠ Danilo, 1979, Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča [A Tomb for Boris Davidovich],
Beograd: Beogradski izdavačko-grafički zavod.
Una tomba per a Boris Davidovič, 2003, Manresa: Angle. Translated by Simona Škrabec.
91
Molés-Cases, Teresa:
How to Face and Comprehend Motion Events in German: Corpus-Based Tasks Focused
on Linguistic and Translation Competence
Although motion is a universal concept found in every language, not all languages express
it in the same way (Slobin 1996a, Bowerman & Choi 2001, Levinson 2001). The
pioneering study in that respect is Talmy's theory about lexicalization patterns (1975,
1985), which points out that there are two kinds of languages regarding the linguistic
expression of the different elements that constitute a motion event (mainly motion,
manner of motion and path). On the one hand, satellite-framed languages –like Germanic
languages– express motion and manner of motion through a single form (e.g. a verb, a
noun, etc.); path is expressed by particles usually attached to this form. On the other hand,
verb-framed languages – like Romance languages – express motion and path through a
single form; manner of motion, if relevant, is expressed by other forms.
In addition, these typological differences can trigger some difficulties regarding language
processing and translation (Naigles & Terrazas 1998, Slobin 2000). Indeed, Slobin (1991)
resorts to verbs of motion in order to illustrate the differences between these linguistic
patterns, and he concludes that satellite-framed languages present a greater variety of
motion events, describe motion in a richer way and devote more narrative attention to the
dynamic of movement. This is a tricky matter, because "translators working between the
two language types face problems in dealing with manner" (Slobin 2003: 164). To study
this issue, Slobin uses corpus data to explore the available resources of each language to
express this phenomenon as well as to answer the question of how each language adapts
itself to the demands of the other.
Since Tim Johns (1991a, 1991b) pioneered the use of corpus data in language teaching
and language learning, what is also known as Data-Driven Learning (DDL) (Johns 2002),
corpus linguistics has proven to offer a wide variety of advantages not only for linguistic,
but also for translation purposes (Pearson 1996, Aston 1999, Varantola 2003, Bernardini
et al. 2003, Kübler 2011).
In our contribution we will present thus a corpus-based study that concentrates firstly on
the linguistic expression of motion in German, and secondly on its translation into
Spanish. Due to the fact that the former is a satellite-framed language and the latter is a
verb-framed language, German learners and translators from German into Spanish can
encounter some difficulties, for instance: lack of univocal lexical correspondence for
manner of motion in verb-framed languages (Cuartero 2006), higher degree of concretion
in German verbs of motion (Galán 1993), etc. In order to account for these problems, the
main target of our presentation is therefore to suggest a series of corpus-based tasks that
92
help students to understand and express motion events. We will resort to a new
multilingual corpus of literary texts, as well as to online monolingual German corpora
(DWDS and Wortschatz Deutsch).
Furthermore, we will pay attention to thorny matters of GFL, for example: prefixed verbs,
separable verbs, verb-noun structures, auxiliary verbs, etc. Hence, our presentation will be
focused on presenting several corpus-based activities that not only highlight the main
complexities of the expression of motion in German but also aim to acquire general
linguistic and translation competence.
References
Aston, G. (1999): Corpus use and learning to translate. Textus 12: 289-314. <http://www.
sslmit.unibo.it/~guy/textus.htm> [16-02-2012.]
Bernardini, S., F. Zanettin & D. Stewart (2003). Corpora in translator education.
Manchester/Northampton: St Jerome.
Bowerman, M. & S. Choi (2001). Shaping meanings for language: universal and language
specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson
(eds). Language acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge: C.U.P., p. 475-511.
Cuartero Otal, J. (2006). ¿Cuántas clases de verbos de desplazamiento se distinguen en
español? RILCE: Revista de filología hispánica, 22 (1): 13-36.
Galán Rodríguez, C. (1993). An Approach to the Study of Movement Verbs in German
and Spanish: Real Movement and Figurative Used. Anuario de Estudios Filológicos 16:
147-158.
Johns, T. (1991a). Should you be persuaded: Two examples of data driven learning. In T.
Johns & P. King (eds). Classroom concordancing. ELR Journal 4: 1-16. Birmingham:
University of Birmingham.
Johns, T. (1991b). From printout to handout: Grammar and vocabulary teaching in the
context of data-driven learning. In T. Johns & P. King (eds). Classroom concordancing.
ELR Journal, 4: 27-45. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.
Johns, T. (2002). Data-driven learning: The perpetual challenge. In B. Kettemann and G.
Marko (eds). Teaching and Learning by Doing Corpus Analysis. Proceedings of the
93
Fourth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora, Graz 19-24, July
2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi, p. 107-117
Kübler, N. (2011). Working with different corpora in translation teaching. In A. Frankenberg-García, G. Aston & L. Flowerdew (eds). New Trends in Corpora and Language
Learning, London: Continuum, p. 62-80.
Levinson, S. (2001). Covariation between spatial language and cognition, and its implication for language learning. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (eds). Language acquisition
and conceptual development, Cambridge: C.U.P., p. 566-588.
Naigles, L. R. & P. Terrazas (1998). Motion-verb generalizations English and Spanish:
Influences of language and syntax. Psychological Science 9: 363-369.
Pearson, J. (1996): Electronic texts and concordances in the translation classroom. Teanga
16: 85-95.
Slobin, D. I. (1991). Learning to think for speaking: Native language, cognition and
rethorical style. Pragmatics 1: 7-26.
Slobin, D. I. (1996a). Two ways to travel: Verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In M.
Shibatani & S. Thompson (eds). Grammatical Constructions: their form and meaning,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 195-220.
Slobin. D. I. (2000). Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to linguistic relativity and
determinism. In S. Niemeir & R. Dirven (eds). Evidence for linguistic relativity, Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, p. 107-138.
Slobin, D. I. (2003). Language and thought online: cognitive consequences of linguistic
relativity. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (eds). Language in mind: Advances in the
study of language and thought, Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 157-192.
Talmy, L. (1975). Semantics and syntax of motion. In J. P. Kimball (eds). Syntax and
Semantics, New York: Academic Press, p. 181-238.
Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structures in lexical forms. In T.
Shopen (eds). Language typology and syntactic description. Vol. 3: Grammatical categories and the lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge, p. 36-149.
94
Varantola, K. (2003). “Translators and Disposable Corpora”. In S. Bernardini, F. Zanettin
& D. Stewart (eds). Corpora in translator education, Manchester: St. Jerome, p. 55-70.
95
Müller, Dirk:
Intratextual Referring: Procedures and Linguistic Devices – a Contrastive Pilot Study
Involving German, Finnish and Estonian News Texts
As part of a larger research project in the field of contrastive text linguistics involving
three linguistic and cultural areas - German, Finnish and Estonian – this paper will focus
on textuality creation issues. There is a wide range of diverse intra-textual procedures and
relations that contribute to the creation of textuality, one of the main factors being
recurrence relations. The research project is based on a broader concept of co-reference
which goes beyond the level of mere grammatical forms, proceeding on the assumption of
referring to mental structures in the space of text and, hence, investigating (intra-textual)
referring also from a contents-orientated and logical point of view.
To start with, the paper aims to investigate, describe and classify various intra-textual
reference processes. Particular attention is paid to deictic and phoric procedures and the
linguistic means used for their implementation. To this end, the paper will present an
overview of corresponding linguistic expressions of German, Finnish and Estonian and
their characteristics and contribution, with the main focus on differences in the three
language systems.
The second part of the paper will concentrate on language in use. The corpus of the pilot
study is made up of original (= not translated) German, Finnish and Estonian news texts
which cover similar topics and which have been published in online editions of
newspapers. In order to define and limit the object of investigation in the present pilot
study, only persons will be taken into consideration as referents of intra-textual reference
processes. The findings from the qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis will be
presented, discussed and contrasted - the various linguistic devices, their distribution, and
in particular their contribution to the thematic organization of the text. Presumable
specificities of the languages (and cultures) concerned in the field of intra-textual
reference processes, however, cannot be attributed solely to language system based
divergences. Instead, the important role and impact of differing standards of verbalization
of facts and different conventions for creating textuality will have to be pointed out. A
summarizing description of such differences in news texts in relation to the three
languages under investigation will conclude the paper.
In future studies, the same research methods will be also applied to other types of texts, to
finally arrive at more general conclusions about conventions in the field of intra-textual
referring which later may find application in language training, for instance for the
improvement of text competence of future translators.
96
Ng, Elaine Yin Ling:
Ideational and Interpersonal Metafunctional Profiles of Chinese Grammar
There has been little research on the applicability of Halliday’s systemic functional
grammar (SFG) framework to the analysis of Chinese translated texts and the possible
adjustments needed to make the model fit for comparative description dealing with
translation from English into Chinese. While more has been done to explore the
differences in the thematic structure between English and Chinese, there has been
relatively little discussion with regard to the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions of
the Chinese language.
The paper aims to test the applicability of systemic functional linguistics to the study of
Chinese translated texts with regard to the transitivity and modality systems, and suggest
aspects of the lexicogrammatical features of the SFG model that need to be adjusted to
make it more serviceable for the analysis of Chinese translated texts. The supporting data
are drawn from selected examples from two parallel corpora of the three-day battle in
Hemingway’s (1952) The Old Man and the Sea, consisting of 1,388 clause complexes
extracted from the English original and its four Chinese translations of the novella
compiled manually with reference to Halliday’s (1994) transitivity model (1994) and
Simpson’s (1993) model of point of view. The study contributes further samples of text
instances to demonstrate the “meaning potentials” of English and Chinese, support the
applicability of systemic functional linguistics to the analysis of Chinese translated texts,
and proposes to modify aspects of the SFG model according to the unique features of the
Chinese grammar and the specific purpose of study for translation description of Chinese
texts.
97
Ralli, Angela / Koliopoulou, Maria:
Bahuvrihi Compounds in German: a Comparison with Modern Greek and Its Dialects∗
This study investigates the structural properties of the German bahuvrihi compounds. The
analysis benefits from a morphological comparison with the equivalent compounds in
Modern Greek (MG). The decision for a contrastive analysis between these two languages
is not arbitrary. It is based on the underlying morphological similarities that the two
linguistic systems display: both languages exhibit a high degree of productivity mostly in
the formation of right-headed endocentric compounds, but they also display other types of
compounds, namely exocentric and coordinative (Koliopoulou, in print). Bahuvrihi
compounds are usually reported to be exocentric structures productively formed in
German and MG, among other languages (Bauer 2008, 2010, Ralli 2012). Semantically,
they express a possessive relation and structurally, it is particularly difficult to identify
one of their two basic constituents as the head of the construction. For instance, in the
German literature, it is still vague if these compounds belong to endocentric or exocentric
structures (Coseriu 1977, Fleischer & Barz 1992, Morciniec 1992, Knobloch 1997, Lohde
2006). On the contrary, for the MG counterparts, Ralli and Andreou (2012) have proposed
that, although neither of the two constituents assumes the role of the head, the
constructions as a whole are not entirely headless and that a derivational suffix assumes
the role of the head: it is situated at the left periphery, between the combination of the two
stems/lexemes and the inflectional suffix, and is responsible for the grammatical category
of the compound word.
(1)
[[[[prasin]-o-[mát]-i]-s] ‘green-eyed’
green-CM-eye-ed-NOM.SG
Since the derivational suffix follows the combination of the two lexemes, Ralli and
Andreou (2012) view exocentricity as resulting from a specific order of application of the
word-formation processes, according to which compounding precedes derivation.
In this study, we intend to clarify the German bahuvrihi compounds contrasting them to
the MG ones. We argue that contrary to MG, in German, there are both exocentric and
endocentric bahuvrihi cases. Both types display the possessive relation but they differ
from each other in that in the endocentric ones no derivational process is involved:
∗
This research has been co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and Greek national
funds through the Operational Program "Education and Lifelong Learning" of the National Strategic Reference
Framework (NSRF) – Research Funding Program: Thalis. Investing in Knowledge Society through the European
Social Fund.
98
(2)
a.
b.
c.
[[Dick][kopf]] ‘thick-headed’.
[[[Herz]ens[brech]]er]
[[[lang][haar]]ig] ‘long-haired’
We show that in structures like (2a) the right constituent is the head, which determines the
grammatical category and the morphological features of the compound. Since semantics
are not sufficient to characterize a compound as exocentric (Scalise et al. 2009, Ralli &
Andreou 2012), we argue that these structures are metaphorical formations, namely
endocentric compounds with special semantic properties.
As far as constructions such as (2b-c) are concerned, none of the two constituents is
responsible for the grammatical, morphological or semantic properties of the compound as
a whole. Thus, we consider them to be exocentric formations, the head of which is one of
the derivational suffixes -er or -ig, which follows the combination of the two lexemes,
similarly to the MG cases, where a derivational suffix is also attached to the compound
formation.
References
Bauer, Laurie. 2008. Exocentric Compounds. Morphology 18: 51-74.
Bauer, Laurie. 2010. The typology of exocentric compounding. In S. Scalise & I. Vogel
(eds.). Cross-Disciplinary Issues in Compounding, 147-164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1977. Inhaltliche Wortbildunglehre (am Beispiel des Typs “coupepapier”). In H. E. Brekle & D. Kastovsky (Hrsg.). Perspektiven der Wortbildungsforschung, 48-61. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann.
Fleischer, Wolfgang & Irmhild Barz. 1992. Wortbildung der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Unter Mitarbeit von M. Schröder. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Knobloch, Clemens. 1997. Über Possessivkomposita im Deutschen. In: I. Barz & M.
Schröder (Hrsg.). Nominationsforschung im Deutschen: Festschrift für Wolfgang
Fleischer zum 75. Geburtstag, 249-263. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York,
Paris, Wien: Peter Lang.
Koliopoulou, Maria. (in print). Komposition in Deutsch und Neugriechisch: eine
kontrastive morphologische Analyse. Peter Lang.
99
Lohde, Michael. 2006. Wortbildung des modernen Deutschen. Ein Lehr- und Übungsbuch. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Morciniec, Norbert. 1992. Zu den exozentrischen Wortzusammensetzungen. In R. Große,
G. Lerchner & M. Schröder (Hrsg.). Beiträge zur Phraseologie – Wortbildung –
Lexikologie: Festschrift für Wolfgang Fleischer zum 70. Geburtstag, 125-132. Frankfurt
am Main, Berlin, Bern, New Zork, Paris, Wien: Peter Lang.
Ralli, Angela 2012. Compounding in Modern Greek. Dordrecht: Springer.
Ralli, Angela & Marios Andreou. 2012. Revisiting Exocentricity in Compounding:
Evidence from Modern Greek and Cypriot. In F. Kiefer, M. Ladanyi & P. Siptar (eds.).
Current Issues in Morphological Theory, 65-82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Scalise, Sergio, Antonio Fábregas & Francesca Forza. 2009. Exocentricity in
Compounding. Gengo Kenkyu 135: 49-84.
100
Ramalle, Teresa:
Adverbs with ‘that’: a Modal Strategy in Romance Languages
The conjunction que/că (‘that’) have been analyzed as a discursive element that can occur
on an optional basis with a type of sentence adverbs in Spanish and Romanian:
(1)
a.
Naturalmente (que) iré contigo
Naturally that I.will.go with you
‘Of course, I will go with you’
b.
Fireste (că) Maria va veni.
Naturally that M. will.come
‘Naturally, Maria will come’
(Data from Romanian, Hill, 2007: 61)
Hill (2012) argues that adverbs with evidential interpretation, as in (1b), trigger an
extended representation of the CP field (Rizzi, 1997) in which că occupy the head of a
Force Phrase, according to the cartography program. Although Romanian and Spanish
allow que and că to follow evidential adverbs, these two languages differ in other aspects:
in Spanish, for example, the conjunction que heads a matrix clause and follows a topic, as
we can see in (2):
(2)
(3)
a.
Que te digo que me dejes en paz.
That CL2psg tell1psg that leave in peace
‘I'm telling you to leave me in peace’
b.
Me dijo que los libros que me
CL1sg. tell3sg that the books that CL1psgIO
los des lo antes possible.
CL3psgDO give2psg. as soon as possible
‘He/She tells me that you must give me the books as soon as possible’
a.
(*Că) bien am petrecut!
That well had partied
‘What a good time we had!’
b.
La mare (*că) pe Ion (*că) l-a luat.
The sea-top that mark Ion-foc that he-has taken
‘To the sea shore, she took Ion not Maria’
(Data from Romanian, Hill, 2012)
101
Whereas in Spanish the conjunction can head matrix clauses, in Romanian the
corresponding sentence is ungrammatical. Besides the conjunction in Spanish can appear
before a topic, a property that can also be found in medieval Spanish, in Romanian că
cannot follow topic.
This paper will examine parametric variation and the left periphery in Spanish and
Romanian, focusing on the properties of the conjunction. Following Demonte and
Fernández Soriano (2009), we will argue that que/că can occupy different positions in the
left periphery: for example, que/că head a subordinate clause and follow evidential
adverbs (see example (1)).We will also show that the re-iteration of conjunction (see
example (2b) in Spanish) can reflect the re-iteration of some categories of the CP field in
Spanish. According to this hypothesis, we will demonstrate that re-iteration is not always
available in Romanian; this is the reason why că cannot follow topic (see example (3b) in
Romanian).
References
Demonte, V. y O. Fernández Soriano (2009): “Force and finiteness in Spanish
complemetizer system”, Probus, 21, págs. 23-49. Hill, V. 2007. Romanian adverbs and the
pragmatic field. The Linguistic Review 24 (1): 61-86.
Hill, V. 2012. A main clause complementizer. In Aelbrecht, Lobke et al. (eds), Main
Clause Phenomena: New Horizons. 279-295. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rizzi, L. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of grammar: A
handbook of generative syntax, Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 281-337. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
102
Sasahara, Ken:
The Rahmen-Structure in German, Colloquial Upper Sorbian of Young Speakers, and
That of Middle-Aged Speakers: on a Corpus-Based, Contrastive Approach
This presentation aims at revealing the nature of so-called Rahmen-construction in
colloquial Upper Sorbian of young speakers and middle-aged speakers, based on the
author’s fieldwork among native speakers using Pear Story (cf. Chafe 1980). The two
sociolinguistic variants are compared with German on corpus-based, contrastive approach.
Upper Sorbian, spoken in Germany, is one of the West Slavonic languages and has
experienced intensive contact with German since at least thousand years. All the native
speakers are de facto Upper Sorbian-German bilingual. German, as is well known, has
rigid word order in terms of the position of finite and non-finite verb forms. In main
clause the finite verb in the main clause occupies the second position of the clause and
non-finite verb appears at the end of the clause (e.g. Er hat gestern ein Buch gekauft “He
bought a book yesterday”), which is called Rahmen-construction (Rahmen “frame” in
German). In subordinate clause, however, the Rahmen-structure is not realized. Instead,
the finite verb comes to the end of the clause and non-finite verb form is put immediately
before the finite verb/ auxiliary (e.g. dass er gestern ein Buch gekauft hat “that he bought
a book yesterday”). Upper Sorbian has originally no grammatically ruled word order in
terms of the place of finite and non-finite verb, inheriting the nature from Common Slavic.
According to author’s observation, however, there are preferred word orders, one of
which the structure corresponding to the German Rahmen-structure. An example is
Wón je wčera knihu kupił
(3MSG.NOM AUX.PRES.3SG yesterday book.SG.ACC buy.PASTP)
'He bought a book yesterday'
in which the finite auxiliary of perfect je “is” occupies the second position and the nonfinite verb kupił “bought” stands at the end of the clause. But such word order does not
always used, although its frequency is relatively high.
To be sought are (1) the differences between generations and between Upper Sorbian and
German and (2) the principles or motivations which affect the occurrence of the Rahmenstructure in Upper Sorbian. Previous studies (Muka 1915, Jenč 1959, Michałk 1962,
Šewc-Schuster 1976 and so on) mention the occurrence of the Rahmen-structure at the
time of each author’s period. They point out that the Rahmen-structure is wide spread not
only in main clause but also in subordinate clause, in the latter of which it cannot be used
in German. This presentation contributes to revealing of the characteristics of today’s
Upper Sorbian and provides a case study of what can happen in intense contact situation
through time. Through the comparison between the young speakers’ and middle-aged
103
speakers’ colloquial language by the author, the use of the Rahmen-structure is more
common among young speakers than middle-aged. The author proposes from his data that
one of the principles or motivations is the intensive language contact with German, so that
the information structure in Upper Sorbian turns to that in German – light-before-heavyelement principle – and the language contact leads to interference and grammatical
copying from with German.
References
Chafe, Wallace (ed.) (1980) The pear stories. Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of
narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Jenč, Rudolf (1959) Městno finitnych formow pomocneho słowjesa a participa
wuznamoweho słowjesa w hornjoserbsjej sadźe. Lětopis, rjad A 6. 3-47.
Michałk, Frido (1962) Der Einfluß des deutschen auf die Stellung des Verbum finitum im
sorbischen Satz. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 7. 232-262.
Muka, Ernst (1915) Městno słowjesa w serbskich sadach. Časopis Maćicy Serbskeje
LXVIII. 126-139.
Šewc-Schuster, Hync (1976) Gramatika hornjoserbskeje rěče. 2. zwjazk - syntaksa.
Budyšin: Ludowe nakädnistwo Domowina.
104
Serbina, Tatiana:
Translation Shifts Due to Entrenched Language-Specific Constructions
Applying the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2006) to
Translation Studies allows the researcher to account for non-compositional and/or
frequent regular structures both in originals and their translations. Constructions are
combinations of features on different levels of linguistic analysis. Since they exist in all
languages and the specific combinations of features could be language-unique, the
translator has to select a corresponding form-meaning pairing with similar features or set
priorities as to which features of the original construction have to be preserved
(Szymańska 2011).
In the present study clause-level constructions affected by translation shifts, in other
words construction shifts, are in the focus of attention. The research moves from abstract
to more specific constructions accounting for various translations of the original
constructions as well as possible factors that may contribute to the selection of a noncorresponding construction in the translation process.
Construction shifts are operationalized through aligned words in originals and translations
belonging to different grammatical functions in the corresponding clauses in combination
with differences in the first four grammatical functions, four being the statistical mode of
the constructions' length. The pairs of clauses with these characteristics are identified in
the English-German CroCo Corpus using multi-level annotation and alignment integrated
in the corpus (Hansen-Schirra et al. 2012). As the next step the constructions that are often
changed in translations are studied in more detail.
The results from the registers of popular-scientific texts and essays suggest that even very
schematic and frequent constructions, such as Subj Verb Obj, often undergo construction
shifts. However, the explanations for these could be found only on the level of more
specific constructions. Different levels of entrenchment (Langacker 2008) of the
corresponding constructions in a language pair are often reflected in contrastive
differences. Thus for the native speakers of the target language the retrieval of certain
constructions is interconnected with more general language-specific restrictions.
Our findings improve the understanding of translation shifts on the level of clause and
could be applied in e.g. machine translation.
105
References
Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at work: the nature of generalization in language.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Stella Neumann, and Erich Steiner. 2012. Cross-linguistic corpora
for the study of translations: insights from the language pair English-German. Berlin: de
Gruyter Mouton.
Langacker, Ronald. 2008. Cognitive grammar: a basic introduction. Oxford: OUP.
Szymańska, Izabela. 2011. Mosaics: a construction-grammar-based approach to translation. Warszawa: Semper.
106
Van Goethem, Kristel / Hüning, Matthias:
Debonding of Compounds in French, English, Dutch and German
This study will focus on adjectives (and occasionally adverbs) that arise through
"debonding" from N+N- or N+A-compounds in French, English, Dutch and German.
Debonding is a type of degrammaticalization defined by Norde as "a composite change
whereby a bound morpheme in a specific linguistic context becomes a free morpheme"
(Norde 2009:186). It typically involves processes such as severance (i.e. decrease in
bondedness), flexibilization (i.e. increase in syntactic freedom), scope expansion and
recategorialization.
In previous studies (Amiot & Van Goethem 2012; Van Goethem & De Smet 2012), it has
been shown that the lack of (prosodic) cohesion of French and English compounds
facilitates debonding in both languages. This holds for instance for compounds or
compound-like sequences with French clé 'key' (e.g. poste clé 'key position') (1) and
English key (e.g. key area) (2):
(1) FR.
Ces deux ministres auraient réclamé, selon ces sources, le poste prestigieux et
clé de Christine Lagarde (...)
'(...) the key and prestigious position of Christine Lagarde (...)' (GlossaNet,
2011)
(2) ENG. The U.S. (...) has said it will do more in terms of intelligence-sharing to (...)
stop some of the killings, and really restore some -- some law and order in
these pockets of lawlessness that -- that tend to be along some very key border
areas. (COCA)
Dutch and German compounds, by contrast, are very cohesive, not only prosodically but
also orthographically, which is strongly in conflict with the debonding process (e.g. DU.
*de sleutel en prestigieuze post, GERM. *der Schlüssel und prestigeträchtige Posten).
However, it is striking that Dutch compounds with an intensifying left-hand member (with
nominal origin) and -e- interfix often do allow debonding:
(3) DU.
De binnenstad staat immers op een reuze betonnen plaat (...).
'The town centre is indeed built on a gigantic sheet of steel (...)'
(news.google.com, 2011)
(4) DU.
Echt een buitenkansje voor een nieuw appartement op een klasse locatie.'
(...) a new flat at a prime location' (GlossaNet, 2011)
107
It can therefore be assumed that the ending of the left-hand member plays a crucial role in
the debonding process. Since Dutch attributively used adjectives mostly end in the
inflectional affix -e, the linking morpheme -e could trigger the reanalysis of forms such as
reuze and klasse as adjectives. In German, the recent (substandard) use of Hammer
'hammer' as an intensifying element represents another case of debonding with possible
influence of the role of inflection: ein Hammerkonzert 'a great concert' - das Konzert war
hammer 'the concert was fantastic'.
In our paper, we will investigate for each of the four languages how the debonding
process is impacted by four different factors: (1) the semantics of the noun subject to
debonding, which seems to be restricted to compounds or compound-like sequences with
a qualifying meaning; (2) the degree of (prosodic) cohesion of the sequence; (3) the role
of inflection; (4) the possibility of clipping (e.g. Hij is helemaal stapel op haar (stapel <
stapelgek (lit. 'pile-mad', 'madly in love') 'he is madly in love with her'). The impact of
these factors will be illustrated by corpus-based case studies.
References
Amiot, D. & Van Goethem, K. (2012). A constructional account of French clé- 'key' and
Dutch sleutel- 'key' as in mot-clé / sleutelwoord 'key word'. Morphology 22. 347-364.
Norde, M. (2009). Degrammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Goethem, K. & H. De Smet (2012). How nouns turn into adjectives. The emergence
of new adjectives in French, Dutch and English through debonding processes. Paper
presented at Adjectives in Germanic and Romance, Amsterdam, March 2012.
Corpora
COCA: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
GlossaNet: http://glossa.fltr.ucl.ac.be/
News archives on http://news.google.com
108
Vanderschueren, Clara:
Adverbial Infinitives with Subjects in Portuguese and Spanish
Infinitival constructions have a rather prominent role in the Portuguese and Spanish
language systems, as compared to some other Romance languages. One particular context
of use are adverbial infinitival clauses with an explicit, nominative subject:
Al entrar Juan, todos se levantaron. (Sp)
At-the enter-INF John, all REFL they-stood-up
‘When John entered, everyone stood up’
Escrevi uma carta para eles cá estarem a tempo. (Ptg)
Write-I a letter for they here be-INF.3PL on time
‘I wrote a letter so that they would be here on time’
Despite the apparent similarity between these constructions in both languages, they differ
from the start: in Spanish the subject is usually placed after the infinitive, while in
Portuguese it tends to be placed before the infinitive. Moreover, the Portuguese infinitive
is obligatorily inflected (estarem). These constructions were often studied in generative
frameworks, but remain scarcely studied from an empirical and comparative viewpoint. In
order to fill up this gap, I carried out a corpus study of about 1200 occurrences in a
Spanish and Portuguese comparable corpus, so as to compare the behaviour of these
constructions in both languages.
From a cognitive-functional angle I assume that: 1) the infinitive can be considered a less
prototypical verb, combining both nominal and verbal properties, and displaying more or
less verbal behaviour depending on the context of use; 2) prototypical subjects combine
both agent and topic characteristics; 3) adverbial clauses form a highly heterogeneous
group of constructions with various degrees of syntactic-semantic autonomy with respect
to the main clause.
Extensive statistical analyses of the corpus data show that, in contrast with the Spanish
constructions, the Portuguese infinitives with proper subjects are closer to the verbal
prototype: they are more dynamic, and appear in more explicitly verbal contexts (e.g.
verbal periphrases). Moreover, the subjects are more prototypical in Portuguese: they have
a higher degree of topicality and have more agent properties. The Portuguese
constructions also tend to be more complex than their Spanish counterparts in terms of
numbers of words and the presence of complements. Finally, in temporal clauses Spanish
infinitives with overt subjects mainly have a thetic interpretations, whereas Portuguese
allow a broader range of uses.
109
As a result, Portuguese infinitives with explicit subjects turn out to be more clause-like
and therefore more serious competitors to finite clauses than their Spanish homologues.
This conclusion converges with the surface facts shown at the beginning: the Portuguese
infinitive is inflected and its subject appears in preverbal position.
More generally, these findings give insight in the flexible behaviour of the infinitive in
different languages: even in two closely related languages as Spanish and Portuguese, the
infinitive has different preferences as to its more verbal or nominal behaviour.
110
Verkerk, Annemarie:
Manner Verbs in English and Dutch
In this paper we present a contrastive study of the use of manner verbs in five semantic
domains in English and Dutch. The five semantic domains are: motion (run, fly),
placement (shovel, wipe), perception (glare, squint), eating and drinking (gorge, nibble),
and communication (screech, groan). From studies of motion event encoding we know
that both English and Dutch commonly use manner of motion verbs such as ‘swim’ and
‘walk’ to encode motion (Talmy 1991, Slobin 1996). In this paper, we investigate whether
the salience of manner in encoding motion is paralleled in other semantic domains, i.e.
whether languages that commonly use manner verbs to encode motion also commonly use
manner verbs in semantic domains other than motion. The data come from a parallel
corpus of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of
Secrets (by J. K. Rowling). The size of the class of manner verbs that is used in each of
these semantic domains will be investigated and compared, as well as specifics of the
semantics of the encountered verbs. Aside from an across-domain comparison, we will
also look at differences between the use of manner verbs in Dutch and English in general
terms. This will be one of the first steps in discovering whether the salience of manner in
the semantic domain of motion is typically extended to other semantic domains, as is
suggested by for instance the large class of manner of perception verbs in English, or
whether the level of manner salience in one semantic domain is independent from the
level of manner salience in other semantic domains.
111
Verplaetse, Heidi / Wermuth, Cornelia:
Do I still want to take this? Soll ich das wirklich schlucken? Uncertainty Avoidance in
English and German PILs – a Comparative Study
Aim and focus
The current study aims to compare the linguistic means used in German and English
patient information leaflets (PILs) for patients’ understanding and behaviour concerning
medicine intake. We focus on the expression of uncertainty avoidance.
Background
Three studies and a European guideline lie at the basis of the current study. Readability
has been an important issue for PILs. However, Clerehan et al. (2005) already made a plea
for a linguistic analysis of PILs beyond the level of statistical readability measures as well
as the content-level. They applied a systemic-functional framework for the assessment of
the quality of Australian PILs for that purpose. On the European level, the 2009 European
Medicines Agency (EMA)’s Guideline similarly contains linguistic recommendations
(incl. syntax and style). This recommendatory guideline has been elaborated by the
different national legislative bodies, including the German Federal Institute for Drugs and
Medical Devices (BfArM) and the British Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory
Agency (MHRA). It was also critically analyzed in Fuchs and Götze (2009). Our study is
further inspired by van Berkel and Gerritsen’s (2012) analysis of intercultural differences
between Flemish and Dutch PILs, which is based on Hofstede’s (2001) concept of
uncertainty avoidance as a cultural value to measure people’s behaviour concerning risk
management.
Research Question
Hofstede’s model describes Germany as a highly uncertainty avoidant culture, as opposed
to the United Kingdom. For the current study we will compare the linguistic means for
uncertainty avoidance in German and (UK) English PILs, as we believe uncertainty
avoidance is particularly relevant for patients’ behaviour concerning medicine intake.
Corpus
Our corpus consists of post-2009 PILs issued by BfArM and MHRA, drawn from the
EMA-database. We will analyze two specific sections from the leaflets, recognized in the
2009 EMA-Guideline, viz. section 2. Before you take XYZ and section 4. Possible sideeffects, as these contain information which is directly relevant for patients’ risk
management.
112
Method
Our comparative linguistic analysis is based on the above-mentioned frameworks. One
field which is crucial with respect to uncertainty avoidance is that of modality (e.g. X may
cause a serious skin rash that may cause you to be hospitalized or even cause death).
Another important domain is the expression of degree (notably expressions of frequency
and severity, cf. Fuchs and Götze 2009, and amplifiers, cf. Pahta 2006). Clerehan et al.’s
(2005: 337) framework further provides us with useful categories, viz. (i) rhetorical
elements (is the reader informed , instructed, advised etc.), (ii) role relationship between
writer and reader (who takes responsibility for the action to be undertaken when sideeffects occur), and (iii) factual content, notably the source of information and quality or
strength of evidence concerning side-effects. Two other key categories from Clerehan et
al. are those of the technicality of (medical) vocabulary and lexical density. The latter is
also related to explicitation and addition of non-essential information for uncertainty
avoidance.
References
Clerehan, R., Buchbinder, R, and J. Moodie 2005. A linguistic framework for assessing
the quality of written patient information: its use in assessing methotrexate information for
rheumatoid arthritis. Health Education Research Vol. 20 no. 3, 334-344.
Fuchs, J. and Götze, E. 2009. Patientengerechte Arzneimittelinformation in Packungsbeilagen. Diskussion und Bewertung der wesentlichen Änderungen in der aktuellen
„Readability Guideline“ Pharm. Ind. 71, Nr. 7, 1094–1100.
Hofstede, G. 2001. Culture’s Consequences. Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions
and Organizations across Nations. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Pahta, P. 2006. This is Very Important: A Corpus Study of Amplifiers in Medical Writing.
In Gotti, M. and F. Salager-Meyer (eds.) Advances in Medical Discourse Analysis: Oral
and Written Contexts. Linguistics Insights Vol. 45, 357-382.
van Berkel, J. and Gerritsen, M. (2012). “Patient Information Leaflets in Flanders and the
Netherlands: Unnecessary Differences?.” In The Language Factor in International Business: New Perspectives on Research, Teaching and Practice. Heynderickx, P., Dieltjes, S.,
Jacobs, G., Gillaerts, P. and E. de Groot (eds.). Linguistic Insights. Bern: Peter Lang, 151174.
113
http://www.bfarm.de [accessed 28 September 2012]
http://www.ema.europa.eu [accessed 28 September 2012]
http://ec.europa.eu/health/files/eudralex/vol2/c/2009_01_12_readability_guideline_final_en.pdfn
[accessed 28 September 2012]
http://www.mhra.gov.uk [accessed 28 September 2012]
114
Wang, Miao:
The Impact of Grammatical Differences on English-Mandarin Chinese Simultaneous
Interpreting
In this paper, I examine the impact of grammatical differences on English-Mandarin
Chinese simultaneous interpreting by drawing upon an empirical study on professional
and student interpreters. The study is focused on the effect of the position of English
adverbial components on their Mandarin Chinese simultaneous interpretations.
In the study, if an English adverbial component, either an adverb or an adverbial clause,
and its Mandarin Chinese translation have the same position in the English sentence and
the Chinese sentence respectively, we will consider the English adverbial component in Y
(Yes) position; if they have difference positions in the English sentence and the Chinese
sentence respectively, we will regard the English adverbial component as being in N (No)
position. The experimental English source text has 94 adverbial components, 45 of which
are in Y position and 49 in N position. Overall, 21 participants, 9 professionals and 12
students, generated 945 simultaneous inter-pretations of Y-position adverbial components
and 1029 simultaneous interpretations of N-position adverbial components.
The assessment of the interpretations is based on a classification of 7 scenarios, namely,
good in content (CG), omission in content (CO), substitution in content (CS), good in
delivery (DG), grammatical error in delivery (DGE), correction in delivery (DC) and
complete omission in delivery (DCO). The results showed that the grammatical position
of adverbial components had a significant impact on the interpreting performance of both
professionals and students in terms of content accuracy and delivery appropriateness. If
the position of adverbial components in English was not a permitted position in Mandarin
Chinese, the interpreters made more substitutions in their interpretation, and more
grammatical errors, more corrections in delivery. Meanwhile, the comparison between
professionals and students showed that in the interpretations of both Y-position and Nposition adverbial components, the impact of the level of expertise was consistently
observed through the better performance of professionals than students in terms of content
and delivery, and in the fact that students made more substitutions and grammatical errors
than professionals.
115
Wen, Ting-Hui:
Strategies of Translating Personal Pronouns from English into Chinese: a Corpus-Based
Study
The current study intends to use a parallel corpus to investigate the phenomenon that the
percentage of personal pronouns is relatively higher in Chinese translated texts than in
Chinese non-translated texts, and to investigate the strategies that are used in translation of
pronouns from English into Chinese.
The Comparable Corpus of Chinese Mystery Fiction (CCCM) was compiled in 2006,
including a subcorpus of translated mystery fiction (with source texts in English) and a
subcorpus of non-translated mystery fiction. It is found that the percentage of personal
pronouns in the translated texts (8.42%) is significantly higher than the percentage of
pronouns in the non-translated texts (5.93%). There are two hypotheses of this
phenomenon. The first one is the “shining through,” interference of the source texts. It has
to be noted that Chinese is a pro-drop language (Huang 1989: 186) – the pronouns, both
subjects and objects, may be omitted from finite clauses or sentences in the Chinese
language. English, however, does not allow a null subject or object within a finite clause.
The second hypothesis is the explicitation strategy adopted by translators. Hu Xianyao
(2006) noted the same phenomenon in his research, but he claimed that the higher
percentage of pronouns in the translated texts was a manifestation of explicitation.
A pilot study was conducted using eight translated texts of the CCCM and their source
texts. The preliminary results show that the translators translated 85.01% of first-person
pronouns and 91.64% of second-person pronouns, but only 59.29% of third-person
pronouns. It has to be noted that one of the translated texts had 8.5% more second
pronouns than its source texts. The results show traces of both hypotheses. The translated
texts are aligned with their source texts, and the contrastive analysis of English and
Chinese is adopted in this project. Concordancers are used in the current study to align the
subcorpus of the translated texts and the subcorpus of their source texts. The use of
personal pronouns in both subcorpora are investigated to analyze the strategies of
translating pronouns used in translating personal pronouns.
116
Wylin, Kim:
The Expression of the Source with Verbs of Deprivation in French and in Spanish
In French as well as in Spanish verbs of deprivation (such as voler/robar ; enlever,
ôter/quitar) appear typically in the ditransitive construction S + V + DO + IO, in which the
IO is a dative that expresses the source of the deprivation (J’ai volé le portefeuille à
Pierre. / Le he robado la cartera a Pedro.). However, in French the source can also be
expressed by the direct object in the construction S + V + DO (+ PO) [J’ai volé Pierre (de
son portefeuille)] (cf. Delorge & Bloem 2009). In other cases the source is comprised in
the possessor who is expressed through a genitive (J’ai volé le portefeuille de Pierre) or a
possessive adjective (J’ai volé son portefeuille), or in the locative complement (J’ai volé
le portefeuille dans le tiroir) [cf. Cifuentes Honrubia y Llopis Ganga 1996, Cifuentes
Honrubia 2010].
Based on an empiric corpus analysis (1600 occurrences from CREA, Frantext and the
French journal Libération), the aim of my study is two-folded. On the one hand, it wants
to characterize the particularities of the construction S + V + DO (+ PO) in comparison
with the more common construction S + V + DO + IO. In addition, the notion of «source»
needs a definition to distinguish it from the related notions of «possessor» and «place» in
order to deal with syntagma allowing various analyses (e.g. on a enlevé la façade de
l’immeuble). On the other hand, my project includes a comparative component: it
examines to what extent Spanish verbs of deprivation appear in the same syntactic
constructions as their French equivalents. This permits me to comment on the specificity
of each language by considering the interlinguistic differences. More particularly, the
reasons of the higher frequency of the Spanish dative, in contrast with the French dative,
will be pointed out. First, I will show the influence of the agentivity and the intentionality
of the subject. Then, I will comment on the expression of possession (Mon portefeuille a
été volé. vs. Me robaron la cartera.) and finally, the role of the prepositions à/a and de will
be specified (cf. amongst others Cadiot 1993 and Marque-Pucheu 2008).
References
ATILF: Base textuelle FRANTEXT [en ligne], http://www.frantext.fr Real Academia
Española: Banco de datos (CREA) [en línea]. Corpus de referencia del español actual,
http://www.rae.es
Austin, P., and Margetts, A. 2007. Three-Participant Events in the Languages of the
World: Towards a Crosslinguistic Typology. Linguistics 45 (3): 393 - 451.
Cadiot, P. 1993. De et deux de ses concurrents: avec et à. Langages 110: 68-106.
117
Cifuentes Honrubia, J.L., and Llopis Ganga, J. 1996. Complemento indirecto y complemento de lugar: Estructuras locales de base personal en español. Alicante: Universidad de
Alicante.
Cifuentes Honrubia, J.L. 2010. Clases semánticas y construcciones sintácticas:
alternancias locales en español. Lugo: Axac.
Delorge, M., and Bloem, A. 2009. Verbs of deprivation in English, Dutch and French: a
contrastive case study. Paper presented at Verb typologies revisited: A Cross-linguistic
Reflection on Verbs and Verb Classes, Ghent University.
Marque-Pucheu, Christiane. 2008. La couleur des prépositions à et de. Langue française
157: 74-105.
Newman, J. 2005. Three-place predicates: A cognitive-linguistic perspective. Language
Sciences 27: 145 - 163.
118
Xiao, Richard:
Lexical and Grammatical Properties of Translational Chinese
Corpus-based Translation Studies focuses on translation as a product by comparing
comparable corpora of translational and non-translational texts. A number of distinctive
features of translational English in relation to native English have been uncovered
including, for example, explicitation, simplification, source language shining through,
target language unique item under-representation, convergence, and normalisation.
Nevertheless, research of this area has until recently been confined largely to translational
English translated from closely related European languages. If the features of translational
language that have been reported are to be generalised as "translation universals", the
language pairs involved must not be restricted to English and closely related European
languages. Clearly, evidence from "genetically" distinct language pairs such as English
and Chinese is arguably more convincing, if not indispensable.
This paper reports on the major research outcomes of corpus-based studies of translational
Chinese in English-to-Chinese translation on the basis of two one-million-word balanced
comparable corpora of native and translated Chinese, namely the ZJU Corpus of
Translational Chinese (ZCTC) and the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC).
These two comparable corpora provide a reliable empirical basis for the systematic
contrastive analysis of translated Chinese in relation to native Chinese in terms of macro
statistics, lexical and grammatical features at various levels, covering macro features such
as lexical density, informational load, high frequency words, low frequency words, mean
sentence length, mean sentence segment length, mean paragraph length, and word
clusters; lexical features such as word class distribution, keywords and keyword clusters,
with specific case studies on items of special interest in translation studies like pronouns,
conjunctions, idioms and reformulation markers; and grammatical features including basic
Chinese structures such as bei passives, ba disposal constructions, shi predicative
structures, suo nominal structures, lian focuser structures, classifiers, aspect markers like
le, zhe and guo, structural particles like de1, de2, de3, and zhi, as well as modal particles.
The research findings of this empirical research of the features of translational Chinese
have enabled a re-evaluation, from the perspective of translational Chinese, the so far
largely English-based translation universal hypotheses.
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