scholarly journals A Contrastive Study of Resultative Constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 287
Author(s):  
Xiaowen Zhang

Researching on resultative constructions has become a hot topic in linguistic field in recent years, because it plays an important role in illuminating the nature of lexical semantics and its relationship with syntax. This paper simply contrasts resultative constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese from the perspectives of their syntactic structures and Washio’s (1997) semantic distinctions, that is, strong resultatives and weak resultatives. I mainly discuss their similarities and differences to deepen our understanding of resultative constructions among these three languages. This paper is organized as follows: section 1 simply introduces types of resultative constructions in English, Japanese and Chinese; section 2 introduces Washio's analysis of strong and weak resultatives; section 3 compares V-V compound resultatives in Japanese and Chinese to illustrate their differences; section 4 compares resultative constructions in three languages which are based on Washio’s (1997) semantic analysis to identify the differences on resultatives in these three languages and furtherly explain why Japanese has only weak resultatives, according to Washio’s analysis; section 5 is the conclusion of this paper.

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (126) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Faiza Qanbar Ali

     English and Arabic belong to different language families since they have different grammar and structures .The main purpose of this paper is to show similarities and differences between English and Arabic objects in terms of syntactic and semantic classification. Moreover, the current paper aims at highlighting the divergences and convergences that exist between English and Arabic objects from syntactic and semantic point of view .The paper falls into three sections: section one sheds some light on basic terms that are of relevance to the core of the study. Section two deals with the syntactic and semantic analysis of English objects. Section three deals with the syntactic and semantic analysis of Arabic objects. The main findings that this  paper has come up with can be summarized as follows : an object is an entity or participant that undergoes an action done by the performer of the action. Syntactically speaking, an English object can be direct , indirect or complement .Semantically speaking , objects can be affected , recipient, attribute and effected. Syntactically speaking , Arabic objects can be cognate , causative ,or concomitant .Semantically speaking , Arabic objects can come as a receiver , agentive or beneficiary.


Author(s):  
Wang Min ◽  

This study raises the issue of the stereotype «man» in the group consciousness of Chinese native speakers. Such methods as questionnaire, comparison, and semantic analysis were used. Semantic analysis enabled to determine four semantic zones: nucleus, pre-nuclear, closest peripheral, and distant peripheral ones. As a result, similarities and differences were obtained in the stereotype «man» in the linguistic consciousness of men and women. The influence of the sociopsychological factor «gender» on the stereotype «man» was revealed.


2015 ◽  
pp. 183-200
Author(s):  
Marek Maziarz ◽  
Maciej Piasecki ◽  
Stanisław Szpakowicz ◽  
Joanna Rabiega-Wiśniewska ◽  
Bożena Hojka

Semantic relations between verbs in Polish WordNet 2.0The noun dominates wordnets. The lexical semantics of verbs is usually under-represented, even if it is essential in any semantic analysis which goes beyond statistical methods. We present our attempt to remedy the imbalance; it begins by designing a sufficiently rich set of wordnet relations for verbs. We discuss and show in detail such a relation set in the largest Polish wordnet. Our design decisions, while as general and language-independent as possible, are mainly informed by our desire to capture the nature and peculiarities of the verb system in Polish.


2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Åke Viberg

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.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Pérez Blanco

This paper is a corpus-based contrastive study of the realization of negative attitudinal stance in English and Spanish discourse through the use of evaluative adjectives. The main aim of the study is to analyse and compare the grammatical patterns in which negative evaluative adjectives occur in each language and discuss the observed cross-linguistic differences in terms of the effects that alternative linguistic realizations have in the construction of evaluative discourse. The working procedure follows a contrastive analysis methodology: description of empirical data, juxtaposition and contrast. The descriptive data have been extracted from a large comparable corpus of English and Spanish newspaper opinion discourse. The study has revealed interesting similarities and differences in the construction of Attitude in each language, which are inferred by contrasting its surface structural features.


Terminology ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatriz Méndez-Cendón ◽  
Belén López Arroyo

Studies related to ESP genres have been carried out lately focusing on different levels of analysis, such as internal ordering, lexico-grammatical patterns or terminology. However, there are not many studies combining different levels of analysis so as to observe how information is rendered in scientific genres. The present study intends to offer a description of rhetorical and phraseological patterns observed in medical research papers and abstracts using a semantic and functional approach. Our methodology is descriptively performed on a comparable corpus composed of research papers and abstracts in the field of diagnostic imaging and published in esteemed journals. We will determine composition strategies by means of the description of the authors’ favourite structures found in our corpus. Once these favourite structures have been obtained for every genre, we will proceed with semantic analysis so as to establish their similarities and differences. Our results will, primarily, help translators, technical writers and ESP students to infer discursive strategies in these genres, as well as to better understand some of the discourse aspects of rendering scientific information in general.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 288
Author(s):  
Zainab Kadim Igaab ◽  
Saja Mohammed Magrood Altai

The present study is a descriptive, analytic and contrastive one because it describes concord in English and Arabic to arrive at the similarities and differences between the two languages. This study aims at describing, analyzing and comparing concord in English and Arabic because the phenomenon of concord has attracted a great deal of attention in the recent years. It also aims at comparing and contrasting concord between the two languages by defining it, showing its syntactic and semantic aspects and illustrating its different types and rules. This study concludes that concord as a syntactic phenomenon exists in both languages. English deals with such a topic clearly and separately in grammar while in Arabic, it is not by being explained in sentences. Arab grammarians pay attention to the role of concord in the sentence and deal with it in different grammatical topics. 


Author(s):  
Ingo Kregel ◽  
Nadine Ogonek ◽  
Benjamin Matthies

Purpose Requirements for business improvement professionals depend on different job characteristics. By focussing on lean management, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a comprehensive conceptualisation of competencies relevant for lean professionals by comparing them to an existing project management competency framework; and second, to identify their similarities and differences in three different analysed countries. Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates 2,701 online published job advertisements in the USA, UK and Germany by means of a content analysis to compare and contrast the respective job profiles. Findings Main findings are similarities and differences in the specification and perception of lean professional’s roles among the three countries. Strikingly, four out of eight considered competency categories comprise 74 per cent of the profiles’ most relevant keywords. Additionally, with the help of a latent semantic analysis, 16 specific competencies can be summarised in a lean professional’s competency taxonomy. Research limitations/implications The collected data only represent a snapshot of lean professionals’ advertisements. Also, text mining results from job profiles could largely differ from other techniques like recruiter interviews or company surveys. Further research could use different methods or combine them to construct a more complete model. Practical implications Lean education and training as well as the respective candidate selection processes can benefit from these studies’ results. Originality/value Requirements and job contents for lean professionals have not been empirically researched on a comparable in-depth level before, even though their expertise is in high demand in any kind of business sector.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evie Coussé ◽  
Johan van der Auwera

This paper presents a contrastive study of the human impersonal pronouns man in Swedish and men in Dutch. Both impersonal pronouns are etymologically derived from man ‘human being’ and they more or less have the same meaning. However, there are important differences in the usage of these pronouns. In this study, the similarities and differences between Swedish man and Dutch men are studied in a Dutch-Swedish parallel corpus. Analysing a parallel corpus has the advantage of allowing one to both study the distribution of man and men in original texts and to contrast the use of these pronouns with their translations.


2013 ◽  
Vol 756-759 ◽  
pp. 4721-4727
Author(s):  
Qing Chen Shao ◽  
Zhen Zhen Wang ◽  
Zhi Jie Hao

Contrastive Studies of Pun in Figures of Speech. Pun as a figure of speech uses a word or phrase to get two meanings: literal meaning and connotation meaning so as to achieve humorous or sarcastic sense. There are many similarities between English and Chinese but in many ways they are different, while people always subconsciously consider them as equal and use them in any occasions. To solve these problems, this thesis solves them through the contrastive study of English and Chinese rhetorical figure-pun. By analyzing and comparing English and Chinese puns in some typical sentences and dialogues through semantic, pragmatic, cultural perspectives, partial tone, forms, meanings and so on. This thesis show that pun between English and Chinese exists lots of similarities and differences from different perspectives. Through all the endeavors done in this thesis, a better understanding of both languages and cultures, and smoother translation would be obtained. Whats more, people can use puns in English and Chinese languages properly so as to eliminate unnecessary misunderstandings when communicating with others.


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