Languages in Contrast - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2002

The study of of course presented in this article has an applied, a descriptive and a theoretical aim. Since of course proves to be very frequent in English, learners will need to know what meanings the item has and in what pragmatic contexts it is used. It has indeed been shown that some learners tend to use of course in contexts where it is felt by native speakers to be inappropriate. In order to explain such inappropriate uses we need detailed descriptions of the semantics and pragmatics of of course. From a theoretical point of view such multifunctional items raise the question of whether semantic polysemy or pragmatic polysemy is the best explanatory account. It is argued in this paper that empirical cross-linguistic work can contribute to providing answers to all three research questions. First, the study of correspondences and differences between languages with regard to the meanings and uses of pragmatic markers is a necessary step in the explanation of learner problems. Second, the bidirectional approach to equivalents, which involves going back and forth from sources to translations, enables us to show to what extent the equivalents have partially overlapping pragmatic functions. An in-depth comparison of the semantic fields in which the translation equivalents operate is the ultimate goal. Third, the translation method helps to see to what extent a core meaning account is justified. In this paper three languages are brought into the picture, viz. English, Swedish and Dutch. The cross-linguistic data have been gathered from three translation corpora, i.e. the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus, the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and the Namur Triptic Corpus.

This paper briefly surveys grammatical resources in the Australian language Pitjantjatjara, for representing the experience of its speakers, and contrasts these with corresponding resources in English. The focus is on types of grammatical structure, interpreted from the perspective of discourse semantics, using the analytic tools of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). However the field is built up in steps so that no prior knowledge of (SFL) is expected of the reader. The starting point is with types of structure within clauses, for construing experience as configurations of people, things, processes, places and qualities. An ‘orbital’ model is proposed for interpreting these structures. This is the basis for analysing structures that link clauses in series, including types of interdependency and logical relations between clauses. A ‘serial’ model is proposed for interpreting these types of structure. Finally these resources for structuring experience within and between clauses are contextualised in patterns of discourse, using extended text examples.

This paper presents a contrastive overview of nuclear transitivity in English and Spanish from a systemic-functional perspective. The study attempts to achieve two main goals. Firstly, we investigate the usefulness of the transitive/ergative distinction developed by Davidse (1992) for material processes in English, when applied to different process types in both English and Spanish. Secondly, we attempt to provide a fine-grained specification of these linguistic resources which might form the basis for computational treatment in the applied context of Multilingual Generation (MLG), the automatic production of texts in various languages from a single underlying data source. We first review the specifications provided for English in the computational grammar Nigel (Mann 1983; Matthiessen 1988; Matthiessen and Bateman 1991), and in the extensive reference grammar developed by Matthiessen (1995), showing that, though useful for practical generation purposes, they conflate the notions of agency and causation under the same system. These specifications thus blur the transitive/ergative distinction, which is also fundamental to observe how semantically related verbs may behave differently in English and in Spanish (Lavid and Arús 1998a, 1998b; Arús and Lavid 2001). We propose, instead, a model of nuclear transitivity consisting of three simultaneous systems: a system of agency (concerned with the presence or absence of the feature Agent), a system of process type (concerned with the semantic type of process involved), and a system of causation (concerned with the variable of instigation). This latter system establishes the paradigmatic distinction between transitive and ergative processes which we claim to be fundamental for an accurate contrastive description of English and Spanish. It is expected that the proposed model, which captures the common semantic potential of nuclear transitivity in English and Spanish, will prove useful as the linguistic basis for a more detailed computational specification in the context of MLG.

This study investigates the opposition between intra-clausal and extra-clausal positions in the preverbal domain in English, German and Dutch. It is argued that some of the traditional criteria used to distinguish between these positions, especially the criterion of pronominal resumption, are not entirely reliable, and a number of new criteria are introduced, including distribution in non-declarative contexts. On the basis of these descriptive refinements, it is proposed that the opposition between intra-clausal and extra-clausal positions can be defined functionally in terms of the scope of illocution markers: the intra-clausal position falls within the scope of illocution, whereas the extra-clausal position is outside its scope. This functional generalization does not only help to explain the various formal criteria that distinguish the two positions, but it is also in line with their typical discourse functions.

In this paper I want to explore the systemic-functional notion of ‘grammatical metaphor’ from a cross-linguistic perspective. After a brief introduction to the concept of ‘grammatical metaphor’, I shall discuss the distinction between ‘congruent’ and ‘metaphorical’ encodings of meaning, as well as the distinction between rankshift, transcategorization, and grammatical metaphor as semogenic resources (Section 1). In a second section, I shall then focus on ideational grammatical metaphors in English and German and revisit the notion of direct vs. indirect mapping of experiential and logical semantics onto lexicogrammar (Section 2). It will be argued that ‘directness of encoding’ within one language can be defined with the help of the concept of ‘transparency’ or ‘motivation’ of encoding between levels. Across and between languages, however, the notion of ‘directness’ either has to be seen from the perspective of one of the languages involved, or from the perspective of a generalized semantics and grammar. In Section 3, I shall then explore the question of the experiential vs. logical encoding of semantic categories across languages, and of how this relates to metaphoricity. I shall exemplify and discuss the fact that in cross-linguistic analyses, one cannot consider any one of a given set of experiential or logical encodings of some unit of meaning as ‘congruent’ or ‘direct’, as long as one does not have a cross-linguistic semantics to establish ‘motivation’ and ‘transparentness’ on. It will also be argued that some of the differences in texts across languages as to what counts as ‘congruent’ can be predicted from comparisons between the language-specific grammatical systems involved. Other differences, however, seem to rely heavily on registerial influences and cultural factors. In Section 4, then, I shall inquire into the question of whether and precisely in what sense we can speak of two different types of grammatical metaphor, dependent on whether they involve a relocation in rank or a mere re-arrangement of mappings of semantic and lexicogrammatical functions. These types of metaphor, it will be argued, have different implications for the metaphoricity of the clause as a whole, as well as for the ‘density’ of the packaging of meaning.

This article deals with adjectives of general comparison in English and Dutch, more particularly, with the core adjectives expressing identity and difference in both languages. These are, for identity, English same and identical and Dutch zelfde and identiek, and, for difference, English other and different and their Dutch counterparts ander, verschillend and verscheiden. Throughout, the contrastive description offered will be based on the analysis of corpus examples of these nine adjectives and on the quantification of their distinct uses. In the first place, I will investigate whether the grammaticalization claim made about English adjectives of comparison in Breban (2002) and Breban and Davidse (forthcoming) also applies to Dutch adjectives of comparison. According to this claim, the English adjectives of identity and difference have two distinct types of uses, fully lexical uses and textual — referential and cohesive — uses which are connected as points of departure and result of a process of grammaticalization. I will show that the same grammaticalization process characterizes the semantics of Dutch adjectives of identity and difference, which hence provides an additional, comparative, argument in support of the grammaticalization hypothesis. Secondly, I will, by elaborating the grammaticalization interpretation descriptively, propose a systematic overview of similarities and differences in the semantics of the English and Dutch adjectives of identity and difference. I will focus first on the different degrees of grammaticalization manifested by the English and Dutch adjectives. I will then investigate in what way the various meaning distinctions resulting from the grammaticalization process are distributed over the adjectives in both languages. This will give us some insight into the overall way in which the core adjectives of identity and difference are organized semantically in English and Dutch.