scholarly journals The Shifting of the Demonstrative Determiner in French and Dutch in Parallel Corpora: From Translation Mechanisms to Structural Differences

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gudrun Vanderbauwhede ◽  
Piet Desmet ◽  
Peter Lauwers
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Structural Differences ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Different Levels

This paper focuses on translational shifts with respect to the demonstrative determiner in French and Dutch in parallel corpora. The paper aims to identify the types of translation shifts that occur systematically, and to explore the underlying mechanisms and semantic effects of this process. For this purpose, a well-balanced sub-corpus of the Dutch Parallel Corpus is used, making it possible to analyze both directions (French – Dutch and Dutch – French). In this corpus, 50% of the demonstrative determiners are translated by a demonstrative in the target text (in both directions). In 20% of the cases, the demonstrative is translated by a definite article, or vice versa, while 30% are translated by another grammatical element (e.g., indefinite determiner, adverb, personal pronoun) or vice versa. The parallel corpus study reveals that translational shifts with respect to French and Dutch demonstratives can be attributed to three different mechanisms: (1) translator preference related to translation universals at the level of the noun phrase (omissions, additions and reformulations of the noun phrase), (2) specific manifestations of translation universals within the noun phrase (syntagmatic and paradigmatic explicitation and implicitation involving demonstrative shifting) and (3) structural divergences between the French and Dutch demonstrative determiner systems (fixed expressions and semantic differences). This analysis demonstrates the usefulness of a detailed parallel corpus study, which clearly distinguishes between changes occurring at different levels, in accounting for divergent translations of the demonstrative determiner in different languages. To this end, several types of explanation drawn from various fields (such as translation studies and contrastive linguistics), must be considered.

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 Contrastive Linguistics, Translation, and Parallel Corpora

2002 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 602-615 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarle Ebeling
Keyword(s):  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics

Abstract This paper regards parallel corpora as suitable sources of data for investigating the differences and similarities between languages, and adopts the notion of translation equivalence as a methodology for contrastive analysis. It uses a bidirectional parallel corpus of Norwegian and English texts to examine the behaviour of presentative English there-constructions as well as the Norwegian equivalent det-constructions in original and translated English, and original and translated Norwegian respectively.

Analyzing progressives in Norwegian

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingebjørg Tonne
Keyword(s):  
Formal Semantic ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Semantic Properties

In this paper, the Norwegian progressive forms are examined by way of a corpus study, including both a monolingual corpus and a Norwegian–English parallel corpus. The corpora reveal patterns and properties of Norwegian progressives that are novel compared to those of a well-studied aspectual system like that in English. The study shows that the progressives should be grouped into two subgroups, according to their combinatorial and semantic properties. The array of properties that is brought out by the examination of the monolingual and parallel corpora is accounted for in a formal semantic frame, based on works by Dowty (1979) and Krifka (1992, 1998), and also drawing on insights from, among others, Rothstein (1999, 2004).

The Prosodization of Weak Function Words in Kurdish Language (Leilakhi Dialect)

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Sadegh Mohammadi Bolban Abad ◽  
Batool Alinezhad ◽  
Vali Rezai
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Prosodic Structure ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Function Words ◽  
Phonological Process ◽  
Stress Assignment ◽  
Prosodic Phonology

<p>This paper investigates the prosodic structure of simple prepositions and dependent personal pronouns as weak function words in Leilakhi Dialect with the theoretical framework of Prosodic Phonology or Phonology of Domains. Weak function words (fnc) of this dialect are proclitics or enclitics that form Clitic Group (CG) with their host. One such feature of these elements is their combinatorial restriction with their host, <em>i.e. </em>simple prepositions as prosodic proclitics must precede a noun phrase or independent personal pronoun and absolute prepositions as phonological words join the dependent personal pronouns in the role of enclitics which give form to the clitic group. The phonetic process and phonological process used in this research are aspiration and stress assignment pattern respectively. </p>

Abstractions and exemplars: The measure noun phrase alternation in German

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 729-771
Author(s):  
Roland Schäfer
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Experimental Validation ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Prototype Model ◽  
Weak Effect ◽  
Specific Measure ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Large Corpus

AbstractIn this paper, an alternation in German measure noun phrases is examined under a varying-abstraction perspective. In a specific measure NP construction, the embedded kind-denoting noun either agrees in case with the measure noun (eine Tasse guter Kaffee‘a cup of good coffee’) or it stands in the genitive (eine Tasse guten Kaffees). Each of the two alternants is syntactically similar to a non-alternating construction. I propose a prototype model which assigns a common prototypical meaning to each of the alternants and its corresponding non-alternating construction. Based on this, I argue that lexical, morphosyntactic, and stylistic features help to predict the choice of the alternant. A large corpus study is presented which supports this analysis. However, in addition to the prototype effects, an exemplar effect is also shown to influence the choice, namely the relative frequencies with which lemmas occur in the non-alternating constructions. I argue that allowing both prototype and exemplar effects is more adequate than following radical prototype or exemplar approaches. It is also verified in two experiments that the corpus-derived model corresponds to the behaviour of native speakers. The weak effect size of the experimental validation is discussed in the context of corpus-based cognitive linguistics and the validation of corpus-derived models.

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 Pseudotext Injection and Advance Filtering of Low-Resource Corpus for Neural Machine Translation

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Michael Adjeisah ◽  
Guohua Liu ◽  
Douglas Omwenga Nyabuga ◽  
Richard Nuetey Nortey ◽  
Jinling Song
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Similarity Metrics ◽  
Mahalanobis Distances ◽  
Parallel Corpora ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Low Resource ◽  
Sentence Level

Scaling natural language processing (NLP) to low-resourced languages to improve machine translation (MT) performance remains enigmatic. This research contributes to the domain on a low-resource English-Twi translation based on filtered synthetic-parallel corpora. It is often perplexing to learn and understand what a good-quality corpus looks like in low-resource conditions, mainly where the target corpus is the only sample text of the parallel language. To improve the MT performance in such low-resource language pairs, we propose to expand the training data by injecting synthetic-parallel corpus obtained by translating a monolingual corpus from the target language based on bootstrapping with different parameter settings. Furthermore, we performed unsupervised measurements on each sentence pair engaging squared Mahalanobis distances, a filtering technique that predicts sentence parallelism. Additionally, we extensively use three different sentence-level similarity metrics after round-trip translation. Experimental results on a diverse amount of available parallel corpus demonstrate that injecting pseudoparallel corpus and extensive filtering with sentence-level similarity metrics significantly improves the original out-of-the-box MT systems for low-resource language pairs. Compared with existing improvements on the same original framework under the same structure, our approach exhibits tremendous developments in BLEU and TER scores.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document