Languages in Contrast - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2016

This paper advances a phonetic analysis of the American English flap together with the American English lateral liquid in contrast to the Japanese flap, thereby revealing similarities and differences among the three sounds. After a brief review of previous studies of the American English flap and the Japanese flap, an acoustic experiment involving the three sounds is provided. The results of the experiment produce three findings which have not been recognized in previous studies: (i) the Japanese flap gets devoiced; (ii) the American English flap is similar to the Japanese flap in occlusion duration and devoicing; (iii) the American English flap and the Japanese flap are dissimilar to the American English lateral liquid, which is longer in duration than the first two, and it rarely gets devoiced.

The study explores mediated identity construction on the local and global stage, in Greek-English tourism material. It examines sample data, drawing on the Greek National Tourism Organization website, to identify shifts in the Greek and English versions of the data using Swain’s (2009) model of critical cosmopolitan orientations. The critical cosmopolitan framework is shown to be instrumental in revealing identity construction tendencies in the two versions, which shape the interaction of host and visitor, the destination and the travel experience. Findings raise awareness of how identities are perceived and constructed in the tourism business and of the formative potential of these practices on discourses. They also have consequences for training practices in tourism advertising, the translation of identities and self-representation practices. Results are expected to carve a path towards raising awareness of the complexities involved in cultural communication and the construction of messages.

This paper provides an analysis of the lexico-grammatical features used in English and Spanish in the rhetorical part pertaining to the proposal step of a particular genre, meeting minutes. The results have been used in the construction of a computerized writing aid designed to assist Spanish writers when writing minutes in English. Corpus-based contrast reveals that minutes share a common rhetorical structure but show differences in the lexico-grammatical choices associated with the various rhetorical parts. Proposals are conveyed both in English and Spanish by means of lexical verbs, deverbal constructions and certain clause types. Cross-linguistic differences are in the choice of tense, mood and voice. The analysis also suggests different degrees of conventionalization of these resources in the two languages. Results form part of a linguistic prototype that includes three main components: rhetorical information in Spanish, grammatical strings in English and bilingual genre/move restricted glossaries.

The increasing interest in cross-linguistic research in the area of epistemic modality calls for developing a common theoretical framework within which the inventories and uses of epistemics can be compared across languages. The aim of this study is to compare the repertoires of English and Polish adverbs of certainty taking as the starting point the classification employed by Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007). It attempts to examine the validity of their typology for cross-linguistic studies with reference to data from English and Polish. The uses of English and Polish epistemics are illustrated with examples from the British National Corpus and the PWN corpus, respectively. Because the means of expressing epistemic modality differ both the cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, the findings are placed in a cross-cultural perspective.

Coherence relations linking discourse segments can be communicated explicitly by the use of connectives but also implicitly through juxtaposition. Some discourse relations appear, however, to be more coherent than others when conveyed implicitly. This difference is explained in the literature by the existence of default expectations guiding discourse interpretation. In this paper, we assess the factors influencing implicitation by comparing the number of implicit and explicit translations of three polysemous French connectives in translated texts across three target languages: German, English and Spanish. Each connective can convey two discourse relations: one that can easily be conveyed implicitly and one that cannot be easily conveyed implicitly in monolingual data. Results indicate that relations that can easily be conveyed implicitly are also those that are most often left implicit in translation in all target languages. We discuss these results in view of the cognitive factors influencing the explicit or implicit communication of discourse relations.