Languages in Contrast - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2010

Coordinate constructions in Fadicca Nubian have not been studied in depth. In order to understand the Fadicca coordinate constructions in a satisfactory way, we need to study them in the light of coordinate constructions in such a familiar language as English. There is another reason for the selection of English as part of the comparison here: to verify the claim (cf. Armbruster, 1960; Sokory, 1990) that these two languages manifest no difference as far as coordinate constructions are concerned. The comparison of coordinate constructions in the two languages involves the semantic types of coordination, the scope of coordinators in the two languages, the number and position of coordinators in coordinate constructions. The paper also shows that Fadicca is one of the languages that lack writing, yet it has its own indigenous coordinators (cf. Haspelmath, 2000: 7).

The study is motivated by Mona Baker’s (1992) observation that it is almost impossible to find a grammatical category which can be expressed uniformly and regularly across languages. The aim of the present study is to verify Baker’s claim by investigating existential sentences from an English-Chinese contrastive perspective. The data was taken from the Babel English-Chinese Parallel Corpus, which is part-of-speech tagged and aligned at sentence level. Variation in the verbs used in English and Chinese existential clauses is discussed, and patterns of notional subjects (i.e. the noun phrase following the existential verb) and how they are translated are considered. The paper also looks into the applicability of Halliday’s theme-rheme approach to studying Chinese existentials and proposes that the topic-prominence analysis offers a more cogent account for the findings reported here.

This paper investigates how English influences the Persian scientific language. By analyzing parallel corpora of English and Persian texts from the areas of education and psychology, the paper seeks to reveal that translation as a language contact phenomenon influences not only the grammatical and semantic categories of the target language, it also leaves some traces of the impact of the source language on the discourse-pragmatics of the target language. This in turn leads to a kind of stylistic variation triggered by the source language. One of the main arguments adduced is that such a replication is based on the cultural filters operating in the replica language. In other words, the borrowed elements show a kind of innovative adaptation to the new environment to resolve their clashes with the target language. Thus the paper primarily focuses on the influence on Persian, through translation, of the English passive construction, as well as its deictic terms of first personal pronouns.

Despite obvious interference risks, it has been argued in former studies that translations constitute a useful tool for investigating lexical phenomena. By means of a corpus study on prepositional clauses introduced by para in Spanish and Portuguese, the present paper shows that translations can also be a valuable methodological tool for the study of grammatical phenomena in a given language. The results from both a translation and a comparable Portuguese/Spanish and Spanish/Portuguese corpus are shown to converge and reveal that the inflection of the Portuguese infinitive is used to strengthen thematic continuity, whereas an overt subject appears in cases of inaccessibility within the sentence margins. The present study therefore deepens former accounts on the nature of the Portuguese inflected infinitive and the Spanish and Portuguese para-clauses in general by comparing translations in both languages.

Conclusive English then and Swedish då are compared on the basis of a bi-directional translation corpus. The examples are classified into five different uses according to certain formal and contextual criteria. The two words are shown to have obvious functional similarities: in each of the categories distinguished then and då are the preferred translation equivalents of each other. But there are also striking differences. Swedish då is generally much more common than English then and the latter is often left out in the English translations. In other words, the use of an explicit conclusion marker is more often felt to be redundant in English than in Swedish. The two words also display positional differences. For example, unlike then, Swedish då cannot occur initially in non-declarative clauses and its use as an unstressed pragmatic particle is confined to clause-final position. Another notable feature is that an unstressed particle in the original text (in both languages) is sometimes rendered by a stressed adverb in the translation, a tendency which suggests that the distinction between stressed anaphoric adverb and unstressed pragmatic particle is blurred and a matter of degree rather than a clear-cut dichotomy.