Languages in Contrast - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2016

Reformulation markers (RMs) — in other words, that is, that is to say, i.e. and namely in English, and es decir, o sea, esto es and a saber in Spanish — are used to articulate different voices (Ducrot, 1984) or points of view (Anscombre, 1990; Nølke et al., 2004) in discourse. This paper offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the RMs found in a corpus of journalistic English and Spanish according to their different polyphonic arrangements. The theoretical framework used is a combination of insights from Relevance Theory — to explain the general role and the specific functions of RMs in the two languages —, and the Theory of Argumentation in Language — to account for their polyphonic meaning. The results show that instances of a high degree of polyphony are generally associated with particular discourse processes introduced by RMs, related to more interpretive uses such as definition, conclusion and consequence. However, significant differences emerge in the comparison of the specific RMs in English and in Spanish. Although the markers are often regarded as synonyms within each language or directly translatable from one language to another, their polyphonic potential may be considered a differentiating element between some of them.

This paper is a corpus-based contrastive study of the realization of negative attitudinal stance in English and Spanish discourse through the use of evaluative adjectives. The main aim of the study is to analyse and compare the grammatical patterns in which negative evaluative adjectives occur in each language and discuss the observed cross-linguistic differences in terms of the effects that alternative linguistic realizations have in the construction of evaluative discourse. The working procedure follows a contrastive analysis methodology: description of empirical data, juxtaposition and contrast. The descriptive data have been extracted from a large comparable corpus of English and Spanish newspaper opinion discourse. The study has revealed interesting similarities and differences in the construction of Attitude in each language, which are inferred by contrasting its surface structural features.

Driven by a shortage of studies on the morphosemantics of word-formation from a contrastive perspective, this article examines 200 English and Spanish terms from the olive oil industry with the aim of shedding light on their linguistic nature. This is achieved by use of a corpus which makes it possible to retrieve the units and their contexts from specialised texts. Besides considering the derivational features of the relevant terminogenesic processes, this investigation considers their semantic characteristics and connects the terms’ formal and meaning aspects. This, in turn, allows observing the close relationship between morphology and semantics in terminological spheres, which is directly linked with the role of these units as a tool for specialised communication. Once the morphosemantic features of the terms have been fully accounted for in English and Spanish individually, a comparison is drawn between the two languages in order to spot and describe similarities and differences.

This study compares eleven verbs of letting in six Germanic and five Romance languages. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the differences and similarities in the semasiological variation of these verbs, both across and within the two language groups they represent. The results of a Multidimensional Scaling analysis based on a parallel corpus of film subtitles show that the verbs differ along several semantic dimensions, such as letting versus leaving, factitive versus permissive causation, as well as modality and discourse function. Although the main differences between the verbs lend themselves to a genealogical interpretation (Germanic vs. Romance), a distributional analysis of constructional patterns in which the verbs occur reveals that these differences are in fact distributed areally, with a centre and a periphery.

Spanish suave is sometimes translated as English smooth or soft. In cluster analyses of data from the British National Corpus and the Corpus del Español, senses of suave are found to align in some ways with smooth, in other respects with soft, and sometimes with neither adjective. For instance, the ‘quiet’ sense of soft in soft noise is related to the ‘gentle’ sense in soft caress. The ‘quiet’ sense of suave is similarly related to a ‘gentle’ sense. On the other hand, both smooth election and suave transición ‘suave transition’ indicate an easy process, but smooth in smooth election clusters with the sense in smooth motion, whereas suave in suave transición clusters with the sense in suave velo ‘suave veil’. That is, a smooth election is ‘easy’ in the manner of an unobstructed motion, whereas a suave transición is ‘easy’ to deal with, like a lightweight burden.

Abstracts play a major role as time-saving and information-managing devices in our globalized world of scientific communication. In many non-Anglophone academic journals the pressure to disseminate results internationally is manifested in the requirement to write an English version of the abstract, usually a requisite for the journal to be included in international databases and citation indexes. In this paper it is my aim to investigate the main lexicogrammatical choices which contribute to the identification of rhetorical moves in research article (RA) abstracts translated into English by Spanish academics, and which are published in prestigious national journals as a requisite for those journals to be included in international databases. To carry out this analysis, three sets of texts have been compiled: (i) Spanish abstracts published in prestigious Spanish journals, (ii) their corresponding English translations published in the same journals; (iii) RA abstracts written in English by Anglophone academics (affiliated to Anglophone institutions) and published in leading international journals whose language of publication is English. I will focus on the discipline of Sociology, an emergent field for Spanish academics in terms of their contribution to the international arena. My ultimate aim is to explore how English translations compare with English L1 abstracts in terms of lexicogrammatical choices.