scholarly journals Cognitive complexity and the linguistic marking of coherence relations: A parallel corpus study

2017 ◽  
Vol 121 ◽  
pp. 113-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jet Hoek ◽  
Sandrine Zufferey ◽  
Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul ◽  
Ted J.M. Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Complexity ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Coherence Relations

scholarly journals Processing of positive-causal and negative-causal coherence relations in primary school children and adults: a test of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach in German

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA KNOEPKE ◽  
TOBIAS RICHTER ◽  
MAJ-BRITT ISBERNER ◽  
JOHANNES NAUMANN ◽  
YVONNE NEEB ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Primary School ◽  
School Children ◽  
Cognitive Complexity ◽  
Text Comprehension ◽  
Cognitive Effort ◽  
Primary School Children ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Task Support ◽  
Coherence Relations ◽  
Causal Coherence

AbstractEstablishing local coherence relations is central to text comprehension. Positive-causal coherence relations link a cause and its consequence, whereas negative-causal coherence relations add a contrastive meaning (negation) to the causal link. According to the cumulative cognitive complexity approach, negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more complex than positive-causal ones. Therefore, they require greater cognitive effort during text comprehension and are acquired later in language development. The present cross-sectional study tested these predictions for German primary school children from Grades 1 to 4 and adults in reading and listening comprehension. Accuracy data in a semantic verification task support the predictions of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach. Negative-causal coherence relations are cognitively more demanding than positive-causal ones. Moreover, our findings indicate that children's comprehension of negative-causal coherence relations continues to develop throughout the course of primary school. Findings are discussed with respect to the generalizability of the cumulative cognitive complexity approach to German.

scholarly journals Pro-drop in interrogatives and declaratives.

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (7) ◽  
pp. 95-140
Author(s):  
Federica Cognola ◽  
George Walkden
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
The Asymmetry

While there has been a substantial body of research on the asymmetry between main and subordinate clauses in terms of the licensing of pro-drop, potential differences between types of unembedded clause have received much less attention – despite the fact that competing theories of pro-drop make strong, clear predictions about the distribution of null subjects across clause types, especially with regard to interrogatives. This paper presents the first in-depth comparative study of pro-drop in both declaratives and interrogatives in two asymmetric pro-drop languages: Old High German and Old Italian. Based on a parallel corpus study using two translations of Tatian’s Diatessaron, we show that there is a clear difference in distribution between interrogatives and declaratives: null subjects are more frequent in declarative clauses than in interrogatives, and these also differ in terms of the persons in which pro-drop is licensed. Our results speak against the V-in-C licensing theory of asymmetric pro-drop of Benincà (1984) and Adams (1987), and in favour of an account based on an Agree relation with left-peripheral operators in the sense of Frascarelli (2007, 2018).

scholarly journals How do translators handle (near-) synonymous legal terms? A mixed-genre parallel corpus study into the variation of EU English-Polish competition law terminology

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Łucja Biel ◽  
Dariusz Koźbiał
Keyword(s):  
Competition Law ◽  
Soft Law ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Eu Law ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Mixed Genre

Terminological variation, i.e. synonymy at the term level, is regarded as a recurrent problem in EU law. Working with a parallel-comparable corpus of EU English-Polish legislation, soft law and judgments in the area of competition, this study explores how source-language synonymy is handled in translation across institutional genres. The findings show that synonyms may be reflected symmetrically or asymmetrically, with variation being eliminated, partly reduced, mirrored, or increased in translation. It is quite frequent for translators to introduce additional variation and cross-variation. This is affected by: genre, source and target asymmetries, complexity of a semantic field, low termness and microdiachronic shifts. The study confirms that synonymy is one of the causes of variation in translation and calls for more conceptual clarity at the drafting stage.

Verwervingsvolgorde van Relationele Coherentie Bij NT1- en NT2-Kinderen van 4 tot 8 Jaar

2010 ◽  
Vol 84-85 ◽  
pp. 59-69
Author(s):  
Anne Vermeer
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Cognitive Complexity ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Strong Increase ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Coherence Relations ◽  
Relational Coherence ◽  
Temporal Connectives ◽  
Over Time

This article focuses on the emergence of relational coherence in linguistic expressions such as and, but, then, while, until, before. When do children start expressing relational coherence through various additive, temporal and causal connectives? Within a cognitive theory of coherence relations (Spooren & Sanders, 2008), it is on the basis of their increasing cognitive complexity that predictions are made about the order in which these coherence relations and their linguistic expressions are acquired. This means that causal connectives do not appear before additives, negative connectives not before positives, and temporal connectives occur after non-temporal ones. We investigated these claims in a longitudinal study on the development of story telling skills in 93 Dutch monolingual and bilingual children between the ages of 4 and 9. The results show a strong increase over time in the number and the diversity of connectives. We found evidence for all the hypotheses emerging from Spooren and Sanders' cognitive theory of coherence relations. We found that there are no significant differences between monolingual and bilingual children in their use of additive, temporal and causal connectives. Finally, it turned out that girls use significantly more additive, temporal and causal connectives than boys do at all periods in time.

scholarly journals A CORPUS-BASED CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF EXPERIENCER VERBS IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN: SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STRUCTURE OF VP

1970 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Predrag Stevan Kovačević
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Study ◽  
Semantic Equivalence ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Theoretical Significance

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it reports on a parallel corpus study of experiencer verbs in English and Serbian and offers a contrastive description of this class of verbs. This investigation reveals two important observations: (i) a number of Serbian equivalents of English verbs with PP complements require oblique case-marked bare NP complements, (ii) the association between P-heads of these PP complements in English and their Serbian equivalents is not random (i.e. certain Ps in English correlate with certain Ps and/or oblique cases in Serbian). Understanding the potential theoretical significance of these observations is the second goal of the paper. The non-random link between English Ps and their Serbian counterparts speaks in favor of them having a semantic contribution, which goes against Neeleman’s (1997) analysis of Ps in PP complements as having no semantic contribution due to the fact that they LF incorporate into the verb. Neeleman’s (1997) account also fails to generalize to Serbian because oblique-cased bare NP complements exhibit syntactic characteristics of arguments. It is argued that the link between oblique-cased bare NP and PP complements speaks in favor of the functional/semantic equivalence along the lines of Caha (2009, 2013).

Translation Mining: Definiteness across Languages—A Reply to Jenks (2018)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
David Bremmers ◽  
Jianan Liu ◽  
Martijn van der Klis ◽  
Bert Le Bruyn
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Bare Nouns

We present a parallel corpus study that compares the distribution of German contracted/uncontracted articles and Mandarin bare nouns/demonstratives. Schwarz (2009) and Jenks (2018) lead us to predict that German contracted articles pattern with Mandarin bare nouns and German uncontracted articles with Mandarin demonstratives. We show that these predictions are only partly borne out and argue for a more fine-grained typology of definiteness.

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