Languages in Contrast - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2017

The present study looks at the deictic adverbs now and 現在 (xianzai) and examines their respective roles in English and Chinese. Now and xianzai are commonly considered to be semantically equivalent. Their primary value is temporal: both now and xianzai refer to the time of utterance, or more generally to a temporal interval which includes the time of utterance. By examining a parallel corpus of Taiwanese and English novels, this paper aims to show that apart from this present-reference value, now and xianzai have little in common. The analysis of aligned texts reveals that: ( 1 ) now is more frequent than xianzai; ( 2 ) there is an asymmetry in the temporal use of both markers. Following Wang (2001) , I argue that now has a wider semantic range than xianzai: whereas now might be used pragmatically (Now, why on earth did she leave at such a time?), xianzai is limited to strict temporal reference. It appears that even in its temporal use, now is more complex than xianzai; now is quasi-systematically contrastive, whereas xianzai tends to be purely deictic. We conclude that now is closer in function to the Chinese particle le than to the adverb xianzai.

This article investigates the use of finite reporting clauses with that-clause complementation (e.g. I will suggest that…) as devices for the expression of stance in academic texts ( Hyland and Tse 2005 ; Charles 2006 ). These constructions are compared to their functional equivalents in Italian, i.e. reporting clauses with che (‘that’) complementiser. The comparison is carried out using a corpus-based approach, involving the analysis of a parallel corpus of Political Science papers in English and their translations into Italian, as well as a comparable corpus of articles originally written in Italian within the same discipline. Thanks to their ability to convey evaluative meanings, reporting clauses are analysed as structures that may provide insights into the epistemological negotiations taking place in the encounter of different research traditions through the practice of translation.

German is well-known for its propensity for nominal compounding. This claim is put on a firmer empirical footing by means of a bidirectional translation study between German and English. The difference between the two languages crystallizes in the competition between compounds and phrases. Two complementary asymmetries emerge: first, German compounds are more frequently translated by English phrases than English compounds by German phrases; second, English phrases are more frequently translated by German compounds than German phrases by English compounds. An extension to other word classes shows that the compounding bias in German is not restricted to nouns. It is tentatively argued that the token frequency of word classes plays a role in the emergence of compound propensity. The heavier use of nouns and adjectives in German than in English might be partly responsible for the higher rate of nominal and adjectival compounding in the former than the latter language.

This article presents a corpus-based contrastive study of (dis)fluency in French and English, focusing on the clustering of discourse markers (DMs) and filled pauses (FPs) across various spoken registers. Starting from the hypothesis that markers of (dis)fluency, or ‘fluencemes’, occur more frequently in sequences than in isolation, and that their contribution to the relative fluency of discourse can only be assessed by taking into account the contextual distribution of these sequences, this study uncovers the specific contextual conditions that trigger the clustering of fluencemes in the two languages. First, the contexts of appearance of DMs and FPs are described separately, both in English and French, focusing on their distribution, position and co-occurrence patterns. Then, the combination of DMs and FPs in sequences and their different configurations (DM+FP, FP+DM, etc.) are investigated. Overall, it appears that FPs function differently depending on whether they are clustered with DMs or not, and this difference consists in either maintaining or erasing inter- and intra-linguistic contrasts.

In this article, we show through a contrastive analysis of person reference in Catalan and Spanish parliamentary discourse, that it is paramount to take into account not only syntactic but also pragmatic factors in order to adequately analyse the differences between two languages that have rather similar morphological paradigms. Thus, we will show that singular deictics are used more widely in Spanish parliamentary discourse, whereas plural forms are preferred in Catalan, which is possibly related to more general cultural features and to the political system as a whole. Furthermore, we will discuss differences in the use of the formal address forms. Finally, we will show that some differences in the use of vocatives may be due to the debating styles and history of the respective parliaments.

This study explores how American English and Peninsular Spanish speakers respond to a compliment. Participants completed an online discourse completion test with nine different complimenting scenarios. A total of 14 different strategies for responding to a compliment were found in the data. Based on verbal reports on language use, it was found that Peninsular Spanish speakers do not compliment as often as American English speakers do. The data analysis also revealed that both language groups clearly prefer to accept a compliment, but whereas American English speakers regard a simple ‘thank you’ as an appropriate compliment response, Peninsular Spanish speakers prefer to agree with the complimented assertion by making a semantically fitted comment. Other differences include the importance of returning a compliment in American English and the need to scale down the illocutionary force of the compliment among Peninsular Spanish speakers.