Motivating w(h)-Clefts in English and German: A hypothesis-driven parallel corpus study

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Gast ◽  
Natalia Levshina
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpus

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.

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.

scholarly journals Verbal and verbal-visual logico-semantic relations in picturebooks: an English-Portuguese parallel corpus study

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-76
Author(s):  
Adriana Silvina Pagano ◽  
Flavia Ferreira de Paula ◽  
Kícila Ferreguetti
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Semantic Relations ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Functional Theory ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Visual Texts ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Visual Text

This article presents and explores a methodology to analyze verbal and verbal-visual logico-semantic relations (LSRs) in picturebooks originally written in English and their translations into Brazilian Portuguese. Drawing on systemic-functional theory (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) and on Visual Grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), verbal and visual text in picturebooks was annotated and analyzed according to the LSRs identified in them. Results showed differences between the type of LSRs that tend to occur most frequently in verbal-visual texts and in clause complexes: while Expansion_Extension is the most frequent verbal-visual LSR in both the source text and the translated text, Projection_Locution is the most frequent LSR in clause complexes, in the source and translated texts as well. The study contributes a proposal to categorize LSRs in verbal text and LSRs in visual and verbal text that proves to be fully operational for annotation purposes and text analysis.

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

Functions and translations of discourse markers in TED Talks: A parallel corpus study of underspecification in five languages

2019 ◽  
Vol 142 ◽  
pp. 139-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludivine Crible ◽  
Ágnes Abuczki ◽  
Nijolė Burkšaitienė ◽  
Péter Furkó ◽  
Anna Nedoluzhko ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Ted Talks

Deriving anteriority in the perfect of recent past

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 35-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martijn van der Klis
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Similar Distribution ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Passe Compose

Abstract Most Romance languages share a grammaticalized construction to refer to events in the recent past, e.g. the passé récent in French and the pasado reciente in Spanish. In English, typically a present perfect alongside the adverb just is used to convey this meaning, commonly referred to as perfect of recent past (Comrie 1985) or hot news perfect (McCawley 1971). We show the French passé récent leads to a reading of immediate anteriority, which blocks readings that are available for the passé composé (Bres & Labeau 2015). In a parallel corpus study, we find that the Spanish and French recent past forms have a similar distribution, and the Germanic languages generally use perfect + just in translation. We then provide a DRT analysis to derive immediate anteriority compositionally.

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