Languages in Contrast - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2023

The paper addresses the employment of body part nouns in the creation of phraseological expressions of some European languages, a topic at the crossroads of language, cognition and culture. In particular, the contrastive analysis explores the common linguistic representation of meanings through body part metaphorical expressions in Italian, French, Spanish and English. While several efforts to gauge the existence of a “European linguistic type” (cf. Haspelmath, 2001) have been largely devoted to the study of grammatical structures, a systematic account of the lexical component of the major European languages has not been attempted yet. Among the lexical units, phraseological expressions (e.g. compounds, multiword units, idiomatic expressions, as well as light verb and light noun constructions) represent a relevant ground to inquire into, since they are the most transparent and authentic vehicle of common ideas and experiences gradually rooted in European communicative realities.

This paper revisits the translational practices of Dominican missionaries who worked in multilingual settings in the Guatemalan highlands in the colonial period. It is argued that the missionaries developed the emerging ideas of European Renaissance linguistics and applied methods of contrastive linguistics to indigenous languages long before this discipline came into being. The main argument derives from an 18th-century collection of missionary writings in Q’eqchi’ and Poqomchi’, two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. An uncommon phrase-by-phrase alignment of bilingual texts allows for the assumption that a contrastive approach to genetically related languages could be the underlying principle in language learning and translation at that time.

This article takes a doubly contrastive approach to spoken academic language. On the one hand, it explores genre differences between spoken and written academic English and French; on the other, it considers divergences between spoken academic discourse in the two languages. The corpora used for this purpose were purpose-built on the basis of YouTube video subtitles and other sources. The focus of attention is on keywords and key metadiscursive routines. The results suggest that, somewhat counterintuitively, the distance between academic speech and writing is smaller in French than it is in English, so that written routines can be more easily transferred to speech in French. French written and spoken discourse shows a greater degree of abstraction and self-referentiality than is the case in English. The article selectively illustrates that both French and English have a distinct set of spoken routines that are not used in writing; these need to be described and recorded in lexicographic resources to make them available for teachers and learners.

Cross-linguistic research has brought extensive evidence on how languages differ in their categorization of actions and events, pointing out the differences in the semantic categories they establish, their boundaries and their degree of granularity with respect to the variety of events they refer to. Verbs describing breaking events vary in terms of generality or specificity of the action description (e.g., breaking or snapping a twig) or salience of specific semantic components characterising the event (e.g., smash being associated with violent destruction) and the same event can be construed differently within the same language (e.g., crack/break an egg). In this article we set out to explore the semantic boundaries of verbs describing breaking events within and between languages. We propose a new methodology combining corpora and a video ontology, using verb pairs generally regarded as translation equivalents in bilingual dictionaries. The study contributes to research on semantic categorization and verbs correspondences between Italian and English.