Languages in Contrast - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2015

Certain sentence structures occur more frequently than others in specialized texts. The vast majority of sentences in the English of both science and technology seem to be declarative in nature, while imperative sentences, which are the normal method of expressing instructions, occur far more frequently in English for Technology than in English for Science. Despite such differences in sentence structure, all these specialized texts have one element in common: they all use regular or major sentences. What sets wine tasting notes apart from other specialized genres is their use of irregular or minor sentences, along with regular sentences. The purpose of this study is to analyze the use of irregular sentences in English and Spanish tasting notes — their frequency, their positioning, possible reasons for their use — using an English and Spanish comparable corpus. Our starting point was the hypothesis that English wine tasting notes would contain more irregular sentences than the Spanish notes. However, our corpus analysis showed that this was not the case.

The present analysis is grounded in the belief that linguists, when describing a language, should aim for a full and comprehensive coverage. Talmy’s (1985, 2000) influential two-way typology, verb-framed vs. satellite-framed patterns, represents the preferred option here for the encoding of motion events cross-linguistically, but does not cover other peripheral uses that a language may show. This paper provides evidence for the growing assumption that languages may in fact show both encoding options (Beavers, 2008; Beavers et al., 2010; Filipovic, 2007; Iacobini and Masini, 2006, 2007; Fortis, 2010, Croft et al., 2010, inter alia). The analysis of a large corpus sample of satellite-framed constructions shows that in Spanish this pattern is not only available but indeed is preferred under some circumstances. Previous assertions that Romance languages have poor lexical manner inventories and lack resultatives can help explain low productivity, but they do not argue against the existence of a satellite-framed encoding choice per se. By analysing naturally occurring constructions in their contexts, I will outline the pragmatic conditions that compensate for lexical and aspectual limitations. When the resultative element (change of location) is a default inference, it can be lexicalized.

This paper provides a comparative account of the interpretation of temporal relations in Vietnamese and English narrative, using a bi-directional corpus of 3,082 clauses of narrative passages originally written in Vietnamese and their English translations and 3,124 clauses of narrative passages originally written in English and their Vietnamese translations. It is shown that the principles for the interpretation of temporal relations between situations in narrative are similar for both English and Vietnamese despite the fact that English has a well-developed tense system, while Vietnamese is a widely-known tenseless language. The principles are based on the temporal properties of situation aspect and the discourse relations between the clauses, which are elicited from pragmatic inferences.

English ergative verbs in one-participant constructions such as ‘the door opens’ often correspond to reflexive verbs or -S forms in Norwegian and Swedish. Following Kemmer (1993), such constructions profile spontaneous-event meaning and belong to the middle domain. This study uses corpus methodology to explore spontaneous-event marking in Norwegian and Swedish from the point of view of Kemmer’s suggested two-cycle development path for middle marking in the Scandinavian languages. The results suggest that there are differences in the middle systems in the Scandinavian languages to the effect that Norwegian has completed Kemmer’s two cycles, whereas Swedish has not. Further, there is tentative indication that ergative verbs are on the increase in both Norwegian and Swedish for certain Subjects and in discipline-specific contexts, possibly due to influence from English.

Letters to the Editor (LTEs) in the local press are a relatively formalised everyday genre in which readers’ opinions appear in a publication. In this article 20 Chilean and 20 Australian LTEs which contained the macro communicative intention of ‘thanking’ were analysed and compared with regard to the structural moves and Politeness Strategies (PS) they presented. The results show that addressers in both cultures follow a highly schematic way of constructing their Letters of Gratitude. This is evident not only in the sharing of most of their obligatory moves but also in that some of these moves present similar lexico-syntactic compositions to establish their limits. With regard to PS, the Chilean group showed the exclusive presence of strategies that acknowledged the role of the editor as a letter mediator directly. This suggests that the similarities found are genre-defining aspects. Conversely, the differences are connected to the cultural context of publication. The results also suggest that expressing gratitude in the written form may functionally differ from the way it is expressed orally. This type of contrastive study helps to identify both the genre- and culture specific aspects of discourse, which deepen our understanding of cultural, everyday manifestations and their realization in different settings.

The present research adopts a contrastive and descriptive approach aiming at discovering the reason for similarities and differences between the metaphorical meanings of animal terms between the two languages of English and Persian. For this purpose the most popular animal metaphors in both languages are compared and contrasted. The animals are mostly those with which we have close contact in our daily lives. It is believed that if we could learn how metaphors have originated across languages we could find some explanations for similarities and differences of the metaphorical meanings across languages and cultures. Contrasting the origins of metaphorical concepts is believed to be an appropriate framework for this goal. The results of this study reflect how English and Persian people conceptualize their surrounding world across cultures and how they lexicalize them. It is found that although the physical characteristics and behaviour of animals are the basis for the metaphorical applications or interpretations of animal terms, they are not the only determining factor. The other factors in metaphorical meanings of animal names are culture, language-specificity, and also those behavioural characteristics of animals which are attributed to culture (culturally salient features).