Languages in Contrast - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2014

It is well documented that there is a one-to-many relationship between Arabic and English genitival constructions. However, it is unclear whether, given this syntactic variation, such constructions show equivalence in semantic function. For this purpose, a corpus-based contrastive analysis of these genitive constructions in a bilingual novel is carried out. As a prelude to a quantitative and qualitative inspection of the data, the (non)interchangeability of the alternative English genitives is determined by eliciting intuitive judgments from 10 linguistically naïve native speakers of British English. Quantitatively, the study shows that the Arabic genitive almost covers the semantic functions expressed by the various English genitives found in the corpus. Qualitatively, the study reveals that the flexibility derived from the English genitive variation, as opposed to the fixed word order of the Arabic genitive, allows the speaker to convey additional meaning. However, the Arabic genitive which employs various formal devices such as overt markers of case, gender, number, definiteness and person can express the same semantic functions. These features render Arabic functional with one genitive and require English to vary its genitive relative to certain phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic conditions.

In this paper we present a contrastive analysis of two similar-looking patterns in English and Norwegian that may be said to express the same meanings. Both English “for * sake” and Norwegian for * skyld have been attested with the following meanings: purpose, consideration and annoyance (used as an expletive). An analysis of bidirectional translation corpus data reveals marked cross-linguistic differences in the frequency and use of the patterns, contributing to a fair amount of non-correspondence in translation between the two languages. The in-depth contrastive analysis undertaken confirms that the two patterns behave differently in the two languages: while English prefers the expletive use, Norwegian prefers the purpose use. This observation regarding the patterns’ conditions of use led to the conclusion that the two languages operate with two different extended units of meaning, and that the two patterns as such are not considered perfect translation equivalents of each other. It was therefore interesting to take a closer look at one of the patterns — the English expletive use — and its actual correspondences in Norwegian. The cross-linguistic investigation uncovers some evidence of “quasi-swearing” in the translated texts and some evidence of different ways of swearing in English in Norwegian, both in terms of how expletives are lexicalized and what they refer to, e.g. blasphemy or sexual blatancy.

Motion and vision seem to be connected domains in, at least, two respects. Vision is a kind of “fictive motion” (Talmy, 1996; 2000a), and both domains seem to appear in similar syntactic constructions (Gruber, 1967; 1976; Slobin, 2008). In this study, we examine whether the different lexicalisation patterns for motion events in English and Spanish also carry over into the domain of vision. In particular, we explore visual Path complexity, the semantic specificity of Manner of vision verbs, and the translation of visual Paths and Manner of vision from English into Spanish. On the whole, this paper provides evidence for parallels between visual and physical motion with regard to visual Paths, Manner of vision and English-Spanish translation. Moreover, it provides interesting insights into further cross-linguistic differences in terms of Manner of vision granularity.

This study focuses on French, English and Dutch adjectives that arise through debonding from N+N (and N+A) compounds or compound-like sequences (e.g. the adjectival uses of English ‘key’ and French clé “key”). Debonding is a type of degrammaticalization defined by Norde as “a composite change whereby a bound morpheme in a specific linguistic context becomes a free morpheme” (Norde, 2009: 186). We investigate for each of the three languages how the debonding process is impacted by three different factors: (1) the semantics of the noun subject to debonding, (2) the degree of prosodic and morphological cohesion of the sequence, (3) the presence of adjective inflection in the language. It is furthermore argued that in the case of Dutch, an additional process should be taken into account, that is the possibility of clipping of N+A compounds (e.g. stapel “lit. pile; madly in love” < stapelverliefd “lit. pile-in love; madly in love”).

The main objective of this study is to compare the structure of the factitive construction expressing negative causation with dejar/deixar (“to let”) in Ibero-Romance languages. It is generally accepted that Portuguese and Spanish exhibit a high degree of syntactic equivalence. However, the nature of the infinitive in the two languages is quite different, displaying more verbal characteristics in Portuguese than in Spanish. By means of a detailed empirical study, this article examines whether this structural difference has an effect on the syntax of the causatives with deixar and dejar. Indeed, statistically the selection of the different complement types (finite clause vs. infinitive, with an anteposed or postposed causee) differs substantially in the two languages. A multifactorial analysis shows to what extent the degree of dynamicity of the main constituents, namely the causer, the causee and the caused event, determine the syntactic variation in the two languages and how this variation can be linked to the different grammatical status of the infinitive.