Languages in Contrast - Volume 1, Issue 1, 1998

This paper is concerned with the potential contribution of parallel concordancing to the study of linguistic systems. While fully acknowledging the usefulness of monolingual concordancing, it aims to show that the strategic use of parallel concordancing can provide new and valuable insights into certain thorny issues. The example chosen is the interaction between French personal pronouns and the animate/inanimate distinction, with particular reference to the use of stressed pronouns. After a brief overview of this issue and its treatment in a number of current grammars, the paper describes various ways of exploiting the bilingual nature of parallel corpora/ concordancer s and discusses the results of different types of search. The evidence shows that stressed pronouns can have inanimate antecedents, but that this is relatively rare and mostly confined to one specific function. Parallel concordancers of the kind used in the study thus provide useful opportunities to approach problems laterally.

The paper discusses basic aspects of a general theory of contrastive stylistics, which is taken to result from the interaction of parameterized properties of languages with universal principles of language use. Proceeding from some basic psycholinguistic assumptions about language processing, the discussion will concentrate on various problems arising from specific processing conditions in English and German. The basic claims will be exemplified by translational evidence subjected to the method of control paraphrases. The findings pertain to contrastive linguistics, translation theory and a better understanding of individual literary style.

In this paper, we present a methodology for the contrastive analysis of comparable corpora of instructional texts in different languages. The methodology is insensitive to the fact that the texts under comparison differ widely in their semantic content, and it can be reliably applied by multiple analysts. We show the results of an empirical study of cross-linguistic variation between Portuguese, French, and English instructions which follows this methodology. Using consumer instructions for ordinary household products in the three languages, we examine expressions of the two semantic relations, generation and enablement (cf. Goldman, 1970), and their available surface syntactic expressions. We examine the role of discourse perspective, as realised by rhetorical relations such as those employed within the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), in further narrowing down the range of choices. We demonstrate that the three languages of study tolerate different levels of ambiguity, and prefer different forms of disambiguation and pragmatic signalling, attesting to the value of empirical methods for contrastive discourse study. The analysis was conducted with the aim of informing all levels of decision, from meaning to surface syntax, in the automatic generation of sets of instructional texts in those languages.

This paper investigates what types of idioms are most likely to be transferred while learning a second language. The subjects of the study were 120 advanced Syrian learners of English. The comprehension of 80 English idioms was tested by a multiple-choice test and an English-into-Syrian Arabic translation test. The same idioms were also tested for production by a Syrian Arabic-into-English translation test. Results showed that learners scored higher in the comprehension and production test of cognate idioms because of positive language transfer. Language transfer had a negative effect when processing English idioms which have false cognate equivalents in Syrian Arabic. However, with English idioms that have pragmatic equivalents and those which have no Syrian equivalents at all, the factor of transfer is replaced, as a strategy, by metaphoric association and pragmatic knowledge of the world. The study concludes that the degree of similarity to a native language idiom does not necessarily help in the process of idiom comprehension or production. Meanwhile, the linguistic differences between the English idiom and the Syrian idiom do not automatically lead to problems in comprehending L2 idioms.