Languages in Contrast - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2011

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of puns in English and German based on a bilingual corpus of 2,400 jokes from published collections. The main assumption is that punning in the two languages differs in quantity and quality because of contrasts in morphosyntax, lexis and phonology. More precisely, given that the creation of most types of paronomastic jokes is considered to be facilitated in English, the English data set is expected to show a higher number and a greater variation of puns. However, a few manifestations of punning are assumed to occur particularly often in the German data. Seven hypotheses related to these predictions are tested. The most significant finding is that puns in the English set clearly outnumber puns in the German set.

This article presents a contrastive study of the verbs REMEMBER, FORGET and REMIND and their Spanish equivalents RECORDAR, ACORDARSE and OLVIDAR(SE), from a broad systemic-functional perspective. Through a database built with occurrences obtained from authentic corpora, a quantitative analysis was carried out on these verbs in terms of spoken and written mode and a number of clausal factors: mood, syntax and semantics of the Phenomenon, voice, polarity, person and modality. These factors were considered both individually and in relation to one another. The analysis uncovered similarities in the use of the English and Spanish verbs and, more significantly, a number of differences, due to a diversity of factors such as mode, lexical distribution, grammatical features and type of discourse, as well as politeness and other pragmatic reasons.

Although Arabic is a language with a long scholarly tradition, relatively little is known about the rhetorical and linguistic features of contemporary Arabic prose. In this paper, we examine 28 Arabic and English paired abstracts dealing with the language sciences drawn from three journals. The analysis shows in both sub-corpora little use of first person pronouns or promotional elements, and the move structures tended to be simple, often only background→ findings. Differences between the two languages included greater use of rhetorical and metaphorical flourishes in some Arabic texts and increased attention to background knowledge in some of the English ones. These findings may be related to certain scholastic traditions in the Arab World and to the fact that Arab humanities journals have only recently required articles to be accompanied by abstracts.

This paper proposes a meaning-based contrastive methodology for the study of prefixation in English, French and Italian which is easily adaptable to other languages and word-formation processes. Our discussion centres on some of the central methodological and theoretical issues involved in contrastive lexical morphology, an area which, to date, has largely remained under-researched. Precise defining criteria for derivative (and prefix) status are presented in order to decide what counts as a derivative (or as a prefix) and what does not. Emphasis is also put on a fined-grained semantic tertium comparationis elaborated for the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical morphology and based on a six-tiered semantic categorisation, viz. location, evaluation, negation, quantity, modality, and inchoativity, most of which are further divided into finer subcategories. This macro-approach makes it possible to draw important generalisations about the use of word-formation devices across languages.

It is often assumed that relative adjectives (e.g. ‘long’, ‘old’) evoke unbounded scales and are, therefore, incompatible with maximizers (e.g. ‘completely’) and approximators (e.g. ‘almost’). In contrast, absolute adjectives which are felicitous with maximizers (e.g. ‘completely full’) and approximators (e.g. ‘almost full’) are argued to trigger bounded scales. This paper investigates whether the semantic typology of gradable adjectives developed for Germanic languages can be extended to non-Germanic languages by comparing the distribution of relative adjectives with totality modifiers in English and Russian corpora. In line with previous research, the corpus analysis shows that English relative adjectives are associated with fully unbounded scales and are very infrequent in combination with maximizers and approximators. In contrast, Russian relative adjectives evoke half-bounded scales. Therefore, relative adjectives denoting less of a property (e.g. korotkij “short”, dešëvyj “cheap”) are quite frequently modified by maximizing adverbs in Russian. However, unlike maximum-standard absolute adjectives, Russian relative adjectives are incompatible with approximators. It is concluded that there is no universal one-to-one relationship between adjective types and scale types.