scholarly journals Parallel corpora and contrastive linguistics: Where to look for pitfalls in the translation of information structure

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Libuše Dušková
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Linear Ordering ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics ◽  
Functional Sentence Perspective ◽  
Parallel Texts ◽  
Basic Distribution

This paper deals with some of the problems encountered in English-Czech contrastive studies of information structure based on parallel texts. It largely focuses on those arising from the different hierarchy of the respective word order principles, the primary one being grammatical function in English, and information structure / functional sentence perspective (FSP) in Czech. Three aspects are considered: linear ordering of clause elements, FSP structure, and the basic distribution of communicative dynamism. Owing to the character and complexity of the FSP factors, word order, context, semantics and intonation, and the lack of distinctive realization forms of the carriers of the FSP functions, the study is based on manual excerpts from passages of digitalized running text of three English novels and their Czech translations drawn from the InterCorp. The results show that most problems arise in the case of different linear ordering as it may indicate either an identical or a different FSP structure.

scholarly journals Translating English Existential 'there' Sentences into Arabic: A Text-based Analysis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ-tls for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Irfan Said
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Alternative Construction ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics ◽  
Syntactic Restrictions

English existential 'there' lacks equivalent in many languages, yet it has attracted the attention of linguists working within contrastive linguistics and translation studies. The aim of the present paper is to investigate how translators deal with English 'there' sentences in two translated Arabic texts. The method adopted in the study is a descriptive-analytic one. In Arabic the words 'hunaaka' and 'tammata' are usually used to render English 'there' ; however, the data of the study show that in many cases translators avoid using these two words. The flexibility of word order in Arabic , in addition to the use of full lexical verbs , more frequently than English does in 'there' sentences , help to translate these sentences adequately into Arabic. It is also found that syntactic restrictions are not the only reason for the fact that many 'there' sentences are not translated using 'hunaaka' and ' tammata'; the discourse and stylistic levels, play a role in the translator's decision to use other means. In some cases, the use of 'hunaaka /tammata' is shown to be optional and in other cases to be obligatory, unless an alternative construction is produced. Major translational changes affecting the information structure of the texts, are not found in the target language.

scholarly journals The role of verb semantics in Hungarian verb-object order

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Dorottya Demszky
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Logical Function ◽  
Semantic Class ◽  
Verb Semantics ◽  
Semantic Classes

Hungarian is often referred to as a discourse-configurational language, since the structural position of constituents is determined by their logical function (topic or comment) rather than their grammatical function (e.g., subject or object). We build on work by Komlósy (1989) and argue that in addition to discourse context, the lexical semantics of the verb also plays a significant role in determining Hungarian word order. In order to investigate the role of lexical semantics in determining Hungarian word order, we conduct a large-scale, data-driven analysis on the ordering of 380 transitive verbs and their objects, as observed in hundreds of thousands of examples extracted from the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus. We test the effect of lexical semantics on the ordering of verbs and their objects by grouping verbs into 11 semantic classes. In addition to the semantic class of the verb, we also include two control features related to information structure, object definiteness and object NP weight, chosen to allow a comparison of their effect size to that of verb semantics. Our results suggest that all three features have a significant effect on verb-object ordering in Hungarian and among these features, the semantic class of the verb has the largest effect. Specifically, we find that stative verbs, such as fed 'cover', jelent 'mean' and övez 'surround', tend to be OV-preferring (with the exception of psych verbs which are strongly VO-preferring) and non-stative verbs, such as bírál 'judge', csökkent 'reduce' and csókol 'kiss', verbs tend to be VO-preferring. These findings support our hypothesis that lexical semantic factors influence word order in Hungarian.

Pragmatics for Latin

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Devine ◽  
Laurence D. Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Association With Focus ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

Latin is often described as a free word order language, but in general each word order encodes a particular information structure: in that sense, each word order has a different meaning. This book provides a descriptive analysis of Latin information structure based on detailed philological evidence and elaborates a syntax-pragmatics interface that formalizes the informational content of the various different word orders. The book covers a wide ranges of issues including broad scope focus, narrow scope focus, double focus, topicalization, tails, focus alternates, association with focus, scrambling, informational structure inside the noun phrase and hyperbaton (discontinuous constituency). Using a slightly adjusted version of the structured meanings theory, the book shows how the pragmatic meanings matching the different word orders arise naturally and spontaneously out of the compositional process as an integral part of a single semantic derivation covering denotational and informational meaning at one and the same time.

Bare nominals, information structure and word order

Lingua ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 120 (6) ◽  
pp. 1476-1501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Salem
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Bare Nominals

Word Order in Old and Middle English

Diachronica ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Extended Version ◽  
Major Parameter ◽  
Language Data ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mixed Systems

In the history of English one finds a mixture of V2 and non-V2 word order in declaratives for several hundred years, with frequencies suggesting a relatively gradual development in the direction of non-V2. Within an extended version of a cue-based approach to acquisition and change, this paper argues that there are many possible V2 grammars, differing from each other with respect to clause types, information structure, and the behavior of specific lexical elements. This variation may be formulated in terms of micro-cues. Child language data from present-day mixed systems show that such grammars are acquired early. The apparent optionality of V2 in the history of English may thus be considered to represent several different V2 grammars in succession, and it is not necessary to refer to competition between two major parameter settings. Diachronic language development can thus be argued to occur in small steps, reflecting the loss of micro-cues, and giving the impression that change is gradual.

scholarly journals Word order in Latin locative constructions: a corpus study in Caesar’s De bello gallico

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stavros Skopeteas
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Motion Verbs ◽  
Structural Domains ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
First Order ◽  
Order Language ◽  
Free Word

AbstractClassical Latin is a free word order language, i.e., the order of the constituents is determined by information structure rather than by syntactic rules. This article presents a corpus study on the word order of locative constructions and shows that the choice between a Theme-first and a Locative-first order is influenced by the discourse status of the referents. Furthermore, the corpus findings reveal a striking impact of the syntactic construction: complements of motion verbs do not have the same ordering preferences with complements of static verbs and adjuncts. This finding supports the view that the influence of discourse status on word order is indirect, i.e., it is mediated by information structural domains.

scholarly journals End-to-end statistical machine translation with zero or small parallel texts

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANN IRVINE ◽  
CHRIS CALLISON-BURCH
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Machine Translation ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Bilingual Lexicon ◽  
Orthographic Similarity ◽  
Discriminative Model ◽  
End To End ◽  
Parallel Texts

AbstractWe use bilingual lexicon induction techniques, which learn translations from monolingual texts in two languages, to build an end-to-end statistical machine translation (SMT) system without the use of any bilingual sentence-aligned parallel corpora. We present detailed analysis of the accuracy of bilingual lexicon induction, and show how a discriminative model can be used to combine various signals of translation equivalence (like contextual similarity, temporal similarity, orthographic similarity and topic similarity). Our discriminative model produces higher accuracy translations than previous bilingual lexicon induction techniques. We reuse these signals of translation equivalence as features on a phrase-based SMT system. These monolingually estimated features enhance low resource SMT systems in addition to allowing end-to-end machine translation without parallel corpora.

scholarly journals Semantics, contrastive linguistics and parallel corpora

2014 ◽  
pp. 85-100
Author(s):  
Violetta Koseska
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Semantic Annotation ◽  
Semantic Structure ◽  
Automatic Annotation ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Linguistic Form ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics

Semantics, contrastive linguistics and parallel corporaIn view of the ambiguity of the term “semantics”, the author shows the differences between the traditional lexical semantics and the contemporary semantics in the light of various semantic schools. She examines semantics differently in connection with contrastive studies where the description must necessary go from the meaning towards the linguistic form, whereas in traditional contrastive studies the description proceeded from the form towards the meaning. This requirement regarding theoretical contrastive studies necessitates construction of a semantic interlanguage, rather than only singling out universal semantic categories expressed with various language means. Such studies can be strongly supported by parallel corpora. However, in order to make them useful for linguists in manual and computer translations, as well as in the development of dictionaries, including online ones, we need not only formal, often automatic, annotation of texts, but also semantic annotation - which is unfortunately manual. In the article we focus on semantic annotation concerning time, aspect and quantification of names and predicates in the whole semantic structure of the sentence on the example of the “Polish-Bulgarian-Russian parallel corpus”.

scholarly journals On the Acquisition of Word Order in WH-Questions in theTromsø Dialect

Nordlyd ◽  
10.7557/12.48 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Richardsen Westergaard
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
Wh Questions

This article reports on a study of three children acquiring a dialect of Norwegian which allows two different word orders in certain types of WH-questions, verb second (V2) and and verb third (V3). The latter is only allowed after monosyllabic WH-words, while the former, which is the result of verb movement, is the word order found in all other main clauses in the language. It is shown that both V2 and V3 are acquired extremely early by the children in the study (before the age of two), and that subtle distinctions between the two orders with respect to information structure are attested from the beginning. However, it is argued that V3 word order, which should be ìsimplerî than the V2 structure as it does not involve verb movement, is nevertheless acquired slightly later in its full syntactic form. This is taken as an indication that the V3 structure is syntactically more complex, and possibly also more marked.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document