Languages in Contrast - Volume 2, Issue 2, 1999

Translated texts have been known as source material for contrastive analyses for a long time. Their value as suitable data has tended to be controversial throughout, and a new controversy is springing up now that corpus linguistics offers new perspectives for contrastive studies as well. Now that we can access large databases in any language, is there much point in drawing on the traditional kind of data that translations offer? This paper argues that corpora of translated texts constitute a valuable source of evidence for contrastive research, since they fulfil many of the criteria that have generally been seen as strengths in corpus study — for example language that has been used in its normal communicative contexts by a large number of users. Translations should be recognised as the normal part of a natural language that they are. The paper goes on to investigate a lexical item — English think — and its translation equivalents in Finnish, showing how sense categories of even frequent items can be drawn up with the help of another language. Unsuspected semantic prosodies may also come up in this process, and connections of particular senses with specific meanings. It demonstrates that a parallel corpus can capture relations of sense as well as form, which would be very hard to capture without such data.

The main concern of this paper is to develop a model of cross-linguistic variation that is applicable to various kinds of comparative linguistic research. The motivation for this lies in the observation that there is little interaction among the major areas of comparative linguistic investigation — language typology, contrastive linguistics, translation studies, and the computational modeling of multilingual processes as implemented in machine translation or multilingual text generation. The divide between them can be characterized by a general orientation towards describing the relation between language systems (as in language typology) vs. describing the relation between texts (as in translation studies). It will be suggested that with a model of cross-linguistic comparison that accommodates both the system view and the text view on cross-linguistic variation, language typology, contrastive linguistics, translation studies and multilingual computational linguistics can be shown to have mutually compatible concerns rather than being entirely disjunct endeavors. The model proposed is based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), using the representational categories SFL sets up as parameters along which cross-linguistic variation can be described. The fundamental assumption brought forward by SFL that acts as a unifier of concerns is that texts are ultimately instantiations of the language system under certain specifiable contexts of use. A model of cross-linguistic variation based on SFL thus bears the promise of opening up the text view for the system-oriented branch of cross-linguistic study, and the system view for the text-oriented branch. I illustrate the model with data from several European languages, concentrating on the register of instructional text.

This paper uses an English-Chinese parallel corpus, an L1 Chinese comparable corpus, and an L1 Chinese reference corpus to examine how aspectual meanings in English are translated into Chinese and explore the effects of domains, text types and translation on aspect marking. We will show that while English and Chinese both mark aspect grammatically, the aspect system in the two languages differs considerably. Even though Chinese, as an aspect language, is rich in aspect markers, covert marking (LVM) is a frequent and important strategy in Chinese discourse. The distribution of aspect markers varies significantly across domain and text type. The study also sheds new light on the translation effect by contrasting aspect marking in translated Chinese texts and L1 Chinese texts.

This paper reports on the findings of a contrastive study of argumentative text structure in a corpus of French and English corporate brochures. The texts in these brochures tend to be instances of 'through-argumentation', where a claim is made — this is the 'thesis cited' — and is then argued through, or 'substantiated'. In the corporate brochure this claim serves to evaluate the company in a highly positive manner. Although these features are common to all of the French and English brochures, there are identifiable differences in the text formats adopted: whereas the English writers tend always to cite the thesis in text-initial position, a significant proportion of the French writers prefer to delay thesis citation. This may be explained, at least partly, in terms of the writer-reader relationship and factors of linguistic politeness. It will be shown that the principles of Politeness Theory, hitherto applied almost exclusively in the study of spoken language, can be used to help analyse and explain certain features of written genres — including those at the level of text structure.

It has often been observed that present perfect forms in English and French have quite differing functions. These perfects are considered here in a parallel description of English and French radio talk. An examination of talk shows and news bulletins in two corpora of the same length and from the same day illustrates some interesting points with regards to the use of the perfect in different genres, and the contrasting functions of the perfect in the two languages. It is concluded that radio talk is a collection of sub-genres within a single environmental context. Tense distribution and usage in each language is one element that contributes to this particular pattern.

This article reports on two parallel but independent studies of idiom variation in corpora — one of Italian and one of English. In the Italian study, 324 idiomatic expressions were looked for in a corpus of 16 million words, while the English study investigated more than 2,800 idioms in an 18-million word corpus. A description is given of the search techniques employed to locate instances of variation.We present our findings by first describing the variation types common to both languages and thereafter examining cases where variation seemed to be wholly or predominantly language specific. Many similarities were found to exist between the two languages, and language specific variation could often be related to more general language specific features. We also comment on the overall frequency of idiom variation, which was found to be very similar in the two studies. In our concluding remarks we suggest that contrastive idiom analysis of the sort carried out, could and should be undertaken between other language pairs, and that the resulting interlingual descriptions would be of use in practical applications such as second language learning and computational tasks.