Languages in Contrast - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2002

This paper shows that aligned bilingual English-French corpora offer the advantage of improving the performance of anaphora resolution in both languages. It sets out a new ‘mutual enhancement’ methodology and discusses the results obtained from running the enhanced anaphora resolution algorithms for English and French on a bilingual corpus. The evaluation reports up to 4.62% improvement of the success rate for English and up to 5.15% for French.

The current surge of interest in studies on intonation, in areas ranging from L2 teaching to child language acquisition, finally mirrors the crucial role played by intonation in the whole of human communication through language. In studies on non-native linguistic proficiency, a ‘foreign intonation’ appears as the last stronghold of a non-native accent, consisting in the use, in a second language, of intonation patterns belonging to the first language of the learner. The use of a foreign intonation does not, however, only characterise an accent. Intonation patterns convey specific meanings in each language, and the correspondence between these meanings and specific pitch patterns is often as arbitrary as the correspondence between words and their meanings. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a basis for the comparison of the intonation patterns of (European) Portuguese and (British) English, highlighting potential areas of difficulty for speakers of each of these languages in learning the other, and the reasons for these difficulties. Second, to give support to the view, current in L2 studies, that the learning of L2 intonation cannot be taken for granted, if breakdown in native to non-native spoken communication is to be avoided.

This paper examines the English and Spanish attributive systems of becoming. Due to the striking syntactico-semantic differences observed in these languages, we deem it necessary, in the first place, to distinguish two distinct classes of change of state attributive structures: ‘canonical attributive clauses’, such as In spring the land turns emerald and Las aguas se habían vuelto amargas, and ‘resultative attributive clauses’ of the type illustrated in My throat was swelling shut and Se tiñe el pelo de rubio. We then proceed to compare the grammatical behaviour each set of constructions exhibits in English and Spanish, in order to demonstrate that, as regards the syntactic encoding of the semantic notion of becoming, the linguistic phenomenon known as ‘attribution’ is, in short, syntactically, semantically and pragmatically far more constrained in the latter language than in the former: on the one hand, its attributive verbal system is subject to greater and stricter semantico-pragmatic restrictions than its English counterpart; and on the other, the productivity of its resultative pattern is quite marginal in comparison with the English one.

This paper explores three types of correspondence relations in a multilingual translation corpus: translations, sources, and parallels. German structures of the type man sieht, with the generic subject man and a perception verb, are compared with (1) their translations into English and Norwegian, (2) the sources in English and Norwegian texts which give rise to such structures in German translations, and (3) the parallel translations in English and Norwegian where German man is introduced in the translation from the other language. Although similar means are available in the three languages, there are important differences, particularly between German and English. For German and Norwegian the three correspondence relations produce the same overall pattern, for German and English the patterns vary greatly with the type of correspondence relation. The multilingual comparison throws the characteristics of the languages into relief, so that we can see similarities and differences more clearly and in more detail.