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.

scholarly journals A multilingual corpus study of the competition between past and perfect in narrative discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
MARTIJN VAN DER KLIS ◽  
BERT LE BRUYN ◽  
HENRIËTTE DE SWART
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
British English ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multilingual Corpus ◽  
French Novel ◽  
Crosslinguistic Variation ◽  
Dimensions Of Variation

The western European present perfect is subject to substantial crosslinguistic variation. The literature, however, focuses on individual languages or on comparisons of a restricted number of languages. We piece together the puzzle and do so in a data-driven way by comparing the use of the present perfect through a parallel corpus based on the French novel L’Étranger and its translations in Italian, German, Dutch, European Spanish, British English, and Modern Greek. We introduce and showcase Translation Mining, a software suite combining a parallel corpus database with annotation and analysis tools. Translation Mining allows us to generate descriptive statistics of tense use across languages but also to visualize variation through its multidimensional scaling component and to link the variation we find to the underlying data through its integrated setup. We confirm that the present perfect competes with the past and we reveal the fine-grained scalar nature of the variation. To complete the puzzle, we ascertain the dimensions of variation, ranging from lexical and compositional semantics to dynamic semantics and pragmatics.1

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).

Posture verbs

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Åke Viberg
Keyword(s):  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
General Similarity ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Reflexive Verbs ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
Germanic Languages

From a typological perspective, the verbs of sitting, standing and lying have been described relatively extensively. Against this background, the present paper provides a contrastive study of the lexical semantics of the Swedish posture verbs sitta ‘sit’, stå ‘stand’ and ligga ‘lie’ based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC), which contains extracts from Swedish novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish. Since the corpus is a very rich data source, the study is focused on the use of posture verbs as locative verbs. It turns out that it is possible to arrange the languages along a continuum with respect to the use of posture verbs versus the copula to describe the location of inanimate objects. In Finnish the copula dominates completely, in English there is more of a balance (in this kind of written text), whereas the posture verbs dominate in German and Swedish. French stands out as a completely different type in this comparison, since the copula is used very little and posture verbs hardly at all. Actually, there is a tension in French between the use of a small number of verbs with a general locative meaning as translations and the use of a large variety of reflexive verbs and resultative constructions with past participles (e.g. être fixé ‘be attached’) which convey fine-grained information about the placement. Among the languages that use posture verbs as locative predicates, there is a general similarity with respect to the factors that condition the choice between lie and stand, whereas even closely related Germanic languages differ with respect to the semantic factors that condition the choice of sit as a locative predicate.

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.

Nominal Reference

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donka Farkas
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Pronominal Reference ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
Nominal Reference ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theoretical Side

Nominal reference is central to both linguistic semantics and philosophy of language. On the theoretical side, both philosophers and linguists wrestle with the problem of how the link between nominal expressions and their referents is to be characterized, and what formal tools are most appropriate to deal with this issue. The problem is complex because nominal expression come in a large variety of forms, from simple proper names, pronouns, or bare nouns (Jennifer, they, books) to complex expressions involving determiners and various quantifiers (the/every/no/their answer). While the reference of such expressions is varied, their basic syntactic distribution as subjects or objects of various types, for instance, is homogeneous. Important advances in understanding this tension were made with the advent of the work of R. Montague and that of his successors. The problems involved in understanding the relationship between pronouns and their antecedents in discourse have led to another fundamental theoretical development, namely that of dynamic semantics. On the empirical side, issues at the center of both linguistic and philosophical investigations concern how to best characterize the difference between definite and indefinite nominals, and, more generally, how to understand the large variety of determiner types found both within a language and cross-linguistically. These considerations led to refining the definite/indefinite contrast to include fine-grained specificity distinctions that have been shown to be relevant to various morphosyntactic phenomena across the world’s languages. Considerations concerning nominal reference are thus relevant not only to semantics but also to morphology and syntax. Some questions within the domain of nominal reference have grown into rich subfields of inquiry. This is the case with generic reference, the study of pronominal reference, the study of quantifiers, and the study of the semantics of nominal number marking.

scholarly journals ¬Learning Island-insensitivity from the input: A corpus analysis of child- and youth-directed text in Norwegian

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dave Kush ◽  
Charlotte Sant ◽  
Sunniva Briså Strætkvern
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Learning Models ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Embedded Questions ◽  
Reading Material

Norwegian allows filler-gap dependencies into relative clauses (RCs) and embedded questions (EQs) – domains that are usually considered islands. We conducted a corpus study on youth-directed reading material to assess what direct evidence Norwegian children receive for filler-gap dependencies into islands. Results suggest that the input contains examples of Filler-gap dependencies into both RCs and EQs, but such examples are significantly less frequent than long-distance filler-gap dependencies into non-island clauses. Moreover, evidence for island violations is characterized by the absence of forms that are, in principle, acceptable in the target grammar. Thus, although they encounter dependencies into islands, children must generalize beyond the fine-grained distributional characteristics of the input to acquire the full pattern of island-insensitivity in their target language. We conclude by considering how different learning models would fare on acquiring the target generalizations.

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).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document