Languages in Contrast - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2020

This study compares the Italian suffix -ista with its English counterpart -ist in terms of productivity. While in English -ist is often used to designate a person who devotes himself to some science or branch of knowledge (linguist), or refers to an adherent of some creed, doctrine, or art (idealist), Italian -ista has extended its use to new meanings (e.g. supporter of a politician, an artist, etc.), and possible bases, from roots to phrases. Moreover, -ista has also extended its applicability to recent loan words and abbreviations, thus becoming more frequent than -ist and often corresponding to the -er suffix (e.g. shampooer vs. shampista) or nominal compounds (e.g. taxi driver vs. tassista) in the formation of agent nouns. The present contrastive (corpus-based and dictionary-based) analyses confirm that -ista is more productive than -ist in terms of possible bases and varied meanings, which have entered the Italian lexicon and are available for the formation of neologisms.

This article examines the functional category of domain adverbials (DAs), which arose fairly recently in the European languages and is claimed to occur frequently in the written press. In order to better understand this category, we investigate the form, use and meaning of DAs in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish and highlight important intra- and cross-linguistic differences by means of a qualitative and quantitative empirical study based on a corpus of journalistic texts drawn from online daily newspapers. Our results show that cross-linguistically DAs are mainly realized as adverbs formed through a standard word-formation rule. Our results also point to important cross-linguistic differences in the frequency and types of domain adverbs used in the five languages. We explain these differences by taking into account grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse-related parameters.

A set of phraseological units that convey disagreement in Spanish, English and Norwegian teenage language are observed from three perspectives in this paper: the phraseological, the pragmatic-discursive and the contrastive perspective. The underlying assumption of the analysis is that the expression of disagreement in these terms among young people takes on certain pragmatic nuances. The Madrid Oral Corpus of Teenage Talk (COLAm), the COLT-corpus (Corpus of London Teenage Talk) and the UNO-corpus of Young Norwegian speakers (Ungdomsspråk i Norden, Oslo) enable a comparison of the use of these phraseological units expressing disagreement among teenagers across these three languages.

Recent research on deictic elements has made extensive use of translation corpora to demonstrate that asymmetries between translational paradigms signal subtle contrasts from a systemic and pragmatic perspective. The purpose of the present study is to identify translation correspondences of the English spatial demonstrative this in Lithuanian and to discuss the contrastive features within the analytical framework of translational explicitation and implicitation. The results indicate that in the prototypical situational usage there is a high degree of correspondence between this and its Lithuanian translation, while textual uses demonstrate low formal equivalence. A tendency to implicitate stems from the null subject construction and object ellipsis in Lithuanian and is also a result of the availability of facultative deictic words in Lithuanian. The apparent systemic difference between the deictic systems of English and Lithuanian indicates a tendency towards optional implicitation and stylistic variation in literary translation.

Drawing on the Lexical Grammar Model, Frame Semantics and Corpus Pattern Analysis, we analyze and contrast verbs of stealing in English and Spanish from a lexico-semantic perspective. This involves looking at the lexical collocates and their corresponding semantic categories that fill the argument slots of verbs of stealing. Our corpus search is performed with the Word Sketch tool on Sketch Engine. To the best of our knowledge, no study has yet taken advantage of the Word Sketch tool in the study of the selection preferences of verbs of stealing, let alone a semantic, cross-linguistic study of those verbs. Our findings reveal that English and Spanish verbs of stealing map out the same underlying semantic space. This shared conceptual layer can thus be incorporated into an ontology based on deep semantics, which could in turn enhance NLP tasks such as word sense disambiguation, machine translation, semantic tagging, and semantic parsing.

This paper focuses on the translation of Manner-of-motion in comics, a genre in which information is conveyed in both verbal and visual language. The study draws on Slobin’s Thinking-for-translating hypothesis, according to which translators tend to distance themselves from the source text in order to conform to the rhetorical style of the target language. Special attention is devoted to the role of visual language within this framework, with the ultimate aim of identifying translation techniques adapted to the issue of translating Manner-of-motion in comics, in both inter- and intratypological translation scenarios. This paper analyses a corpus that includes a selection from the Belgian comic series Les aventures de Tintin and its translation into two satellite-framed languages (English and German) and two verb-framed languages (Spanish and Catalan). Overall, the results highlight the key role of visual language in the translation of Manner-of-motion in comics, since this can compensate for alterations in the verbal code of target texts, by comparison with originals, and thus minimize the consequences of Thinking-for-translating. Moreover, the (limited) space in the balloons and the respective stylistic conventions of comic books in each language are shown to constrain translation to some extent.