Languages in Contrast - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2011

This article presents a corpus-based contrastive study of word clusters and reformulation markers in Chinese and English, and discusses the implications of the findings for translation universal hypotheses. The study is based on three balanced comparable corpora which represent British English, native Chinese and translational Chinese in addition to an English-Chinese parallel corpus which provides a basis for comparing native and translated English and investigating explicitation in translation. Our results show that word clusters are substantially more common in translated Chinese, suggesting a tendency in translations to use fixed and semi-fixed recurring patterns in an attempt to achieve improved fluency. The more frequent use of word clusters, especially those of high frequency and high coverage in translational Chinese, is also likely to be a result of the influence of the English source language because word clusters are significantly more prevalent in native English in relation to native Chinese. Chinese and English tend to use reformulation markers of different styles while on the other hand, reformulation markers are generally more common in both translated English and translated Chinese than in their native counterparts, suggesting that reformulation markers function as a strategy for explicitation in translations, which tend to use oral, stylistically simpler forms than non-translated texts.

The relationship between language and culture is an interplay between linguistic choices and cultural filters; if we accept that language is an expression of culture, i.e. of the beliefs, customs, behaviours and rituals constituting the cultural identity of a group of people, then it is crucial that phraseology and cultural features are not separated in the analysis and production of meaning.This paper aims to combine two different methodological approaches to the study of meaning (Manca 2008, 2009): the Corpus Linguistics approach within the framework of John Sinclair’s view of language (1991, 1996) and the Intercultural Studies approach based on Hall’s ([1976] 1989) theories and Katan’s (2004, 2006) framework of High and Low Context Cultures features in transactional communication. The two levels of analysis allow the researcher to carry out both a quantitative and qualitative analysis.Examples that show the validity of this combined approach will be derived from a number of corpora of different subsections of the British and Italian languages of tourism. We will see that the two cultures tend to adopt different types of promotion in terms of linguistic devices (for example use of concrete nouns vs. abstract nouns) and features of description along a continuum which sees at one extreme explicitness and simple facts and at the other extreme implicitness, feelings and opinions.

The study proposes an analytical pipeline for quantitative corpus-based research in the domain of contrastive linguistic analysis. Specifically, it is proposed that a combination of conditional inference tree models for data exploration combined with subsequent statistical modeling via generalized linear models can help reveal and describe interesting contrasts between the languages under investigation. The main goal of this paper is to provide an approachable introduction into the rationale underlying these techniques and to illustrate their application on the basis of a contrastive analysis of English and German relative clause constructions.

Cognitive linguists have finally agreed that metaphorical thought is the result of neither nature nor nurture, but a combination of both. Despite the acknowledgment of this dual grounding (Sinha, 1999), cross-linguistic studies addressing the significance of cultural factors to form specialised concepts through metaphor are still rare. Research is even scarcer when it comes to terminological resemblance metaphor. To fill this gap, this paper examines a set of resemblance metaphor term pairs in English and Spanish, which had been retrieved from a corpus of marine biology texts extracted from academic journals. Based on the analysis of these terms, we propose a typology of metaphors which classifies them according to their level of socio-cognitive situatedness. This typology shows that: (i) sensorimotor perception and sociocultural factors merge into a physical-social experience that shapes scientific knowledge through metaphor, and (ii) sociocognitive patterns involved in terminological metaphor formation give rise to inter-linguistic variation and commonalities.

Levin and Rappaport (1995) have proposed a binary classification for change of state verbs that revolves around the locus of cause for these changes: whether the cause is internal or external to the entity undergoing change. They claim this distinction is crosslinguistically viable and explains the syntactic behavior of these predicates. Based on work done by Smith (1970) and Wright (2001), this paper argues for an extension of Levin and Rappaport’s binary classification. Instead, I propose a continuum resulting from the analysis of corpora in English and Spanish for verbs that would enter the binary categories advanced by Levin and Rappaport. One of the problematic pairs of verbs for their classification when applied to Spanish, florecer ‘to bloom’ and marchitar(se) ‘to wilt’ is analyzed in detail. The continuum proposed here extends Levin and Rappaport’s categories and takes into account the locus of control of the change and whether external factors may be necessary conditions for the change to occur. In particular, this new focus can account for the presence or absence of the clitic se with some of the predicates in Spanish.