Languages in Contrast - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2018

Academic spoken discourse has been a dominant issue for discourse studies researchers for the last 25 years or so. Different spoken academic genres have been analysed ( Swales, 1990 , 2004 ; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995 ; Bhatia, 2001 , 2002 ; Mauranen, 2001 ; Juzwik, 2004 ; Crawford-Camiciottoli, 2004 , 2007 ; among others) thanks to the compilation and the easy access to electronic spoken corpora. This study focuses on the genre of lecture as “the central ritual of the culture of learning” ( Benson, 1994 ) in higher education. Here, I analyse the use of evaluative language in medical discourse lectures. A contrastive study between Spanish and English medical lectures is carried out. To my knowledge, little attention has been paid to the analysis of evaluative language in medical discourse. The present study employs a quantitative and a qualitative approach to analyse four Spanish and English medical discourse lectures with an average of 35,000 words. The English lectures have been taken from the Michigan Corpus of Academic and Spoken English (MICASE) and the Spanish lectures have been recorded and transcribed in the Degree in Medicine course at a Spanish university for the purpose of this study. Corpus analysis tools have been used to analyse attitudinal language expressing explicit evaluation. The findings show similarities and also differences in the use of evaluative markers in academic medical discourse.

This paper contrasts lexical cohesion between English and German spoken and written registers, reporting findings from a quantitative lexical analysis. After an overview of research aims and motivations we formulate hypotheses on distributions of shallow features as indicators of lexical cohesion across languages and modes and with respect to register ranking and variation. The shallow features analysed are: highly frequent words in texts, lexical density, standardized type-token-ratio, top-frequent content words of the language within individual registers and texts, and several types of Latinate words. Descriptive analyses of the corpus are then presented and statistically validated with the help of univariate and multivariate analyses. The results are interpreted relative to our hypotheses and related to the following properties of texts in terms of lexical cohesion: semantic variability, cohesive strength, number and length of nominal chains, degree of specification of lexis, and degree of variation along all of these properties.

The present paper reports on a translation-based teaching-oriented study of the expression of path and manner of motion ( Talmy 1972 ) in English and Spanish. The aim is to explore contrastive differences by analysing translations, with special attention to crossed transposition ( Molina and Hurtado Albir 2002 ), which implies a double shift of part-of-speech from the source text to the target text, and is the expected type of transfer between a satellite-framed language like English and a verb-framed language like Spanish. Two corpora have been used, a monolingual corpus of Children’s Short Stories, the CSS-corpus, and a parallel corpus English-Spanish, P-ACTRES 2.0. The results show a high tendency for implicitation of either path or manner and for compression in the translations into Spanish, whereas crossed transposition is preferred in the translations into English. Also, some pedagogical applications are suggested for including these motion expressions in TEFL to young learners through storytelling.

Pronominal subject use constitutes a potential challenge in translation because of cross-linguistic differences: while the subject must be expressed in non-null subject languages, this is not necessary in null subject languages. The aim of the paper is twofold: first, to show that the type of source language influences the frequency of personal pronouns in translation, and second, to establish whether translations into a null subject language differ from comparable target language originals in terms of pronominal subject use. The study is based on the analysis of a 625,000-word corpus comprising original and translated popular science texts in Slovene and the corresponding source texts in English and Italian. The results confirm that pronominal subjects are more frequent in translations from English, a non-null subject language; furthermore, they are more frequent in translations than in comparable originals. Untypical cohesive patterns are identified in translations and possible reasons for their presence are explored.

This study compares the semantic networks of the verbal prefix u- in two South Slavic languages, Bulgarian (blg.) and Croatian (cro.), in a cognitive linguistics framework using two databases of prefixed verbs drawn from dictionaries and corpora. We point to similarities and overlapping categories in the semantic networks of u- in blg. and cro., as well as to differences. When accounting for the differences, we consider prefixes semantically similar to u- (within one language and in both languages) that combine with the same base verbs forming either prefixed near-synonyms (e.g., blg. uvehna, zavehna, izvehna ‘wither, fade’; cro. umastiti, omastiti, zamastiti ‘grease, stain’) or prefixed verbs that are only seemingly near-synonyms (e.g., blg. ukaža ‘indicate, show’, okaža se ‘turn out’; cro. ocrniti ‘denigrate, slander’, ucrniti (se) ‘color black, wear black’). We examine how the meaning networks of individual semantically related prefixes (e.g., u- and za-, iz-) overlap within one language and across the two languages, as well as how different construals of the same event affect the prefix choice.

The article presents and compares ways of expressing diminution in English and Slovene nouns, verbs and adjectives with the aim of testing a hypothesis suggesting that Slovene uses diminutive forms more frequently than English. Depending on language typology, diminutiveness can be realized predominantly word-formationally or predominantly analytically. The hypothesis is tested against an analysis of diminutive forms used in Dahl’s Matilda and its Slovene translation, showing that Slovene indeed prefers to use diminutives more frequently than English. A tendency can be established for Slovene to form diminutives by word-formational means in the categories of noun and verb. In verbs, English tends towards neutrality of expression. Frequent use of multiple diminutiveness and the ability of analytic and synthetic diminutive forms to be freely interchangeable in Slovene testify to the strong presence of diminutive forms in the language system.