Languages in Contrast - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2004

Within a dynamic semantic/pragmatic framework this article discusses the translation relations of the Norwegian connective dermed with respect to English primarily, but also to some extent with respect to German. Data are extracted from the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. Translations between English and Norwegian are analysed in detail with a view to their interpretive resemblance as this concept is used in relevance theory. An event-based analysis is considered a fruitful addition to the relevance theoretic framework for an evaluation of the translation data. Corpus-based frequency counts are then presented to demonstrate the extent to which source language norms influence the use of linking adverbials in translation. The discrepancy between the norms of originally produced Norwegian and the findings in the translation data suggests that the translator is well advised to look for alternative means to trigger the consequential interpretation this connective gives rise to.

An approach to contrastive analysis is discussed that combines semantic mapping with analysis of comparable corpus data. Such an approach can help elucidate the many-to-many relationships between expressions or constructions of two languages. In turn, contrastive analysis is what enables us to represent the conceptual space that forms the basis for semantic mapping. The approach is illustrated with examples of expressions of adversative coherence relations from English and French political discourse.

On a global level, an attempt will be made to relate relatively macro-level intuitions about properties of texts to more micro-level notions and to empirically testable lexicogrammatical properties. The strategy will be to (a) partly reduce an intuitive notion of ‘information distribution’ in texts and sentences to more technical and better understood notions of ‘information structure’, ‘informational density’ and ‘grammatical metaphoricity’, and (b) operationalize these latter notions in such a way as to make them empirically testable on electronic corpora, using the ‘shallow’ concepts of ‘explicitness, density, and directness’ as properties of semantics-to-grammar mapping in sentences. It will furthermore be suggested that aspects of intuitive qualities of texts, such as ‘content orientation’ vs. ‘interactant orientation’ and others can be partly modelled in terms of (a) and (b). The argumentation in this paper thus proceeds from intuitive text-level notions to more technical and clause-based concepts, and from these concepts to operationalizations. It then moves ‘upwards’ again to text-level properties, exploring the relationships between the two levels. Finally, an outline is attempted of some implications for studies of language contact and language change.

Translations are invaluable sources for contrastive research. Yet they possess specific linguistic features, which arise from the nature of translation as a form of language contact. This paper explores some aspects of the specificity of translated texts: social and cognitive determinants of translations are briefly discussed, and the linguistic consequences are evaluated in view of recent findings of corpus research based on translational corpora, parallel as well as monolingual comparable corpora. It is argued that we cannot hope to ‘purify’ translational data so as to have them reflect two fully independent languages, unless we sacrifice the use of naturally-occurring data. Translational corpora are biased for genre, because translation situations are asymmetrical, and they are biased for equivalence, because the situation necessitates a search for equivalence more than might be natural in spontaneous production. However, translation and other language contact are ubiquitous in our globalized world; thus entirely independent, ‘pure’ languages are more illusory than real, thus hardly worth hankering after.

To find out how the ‘generic person’ is expressed in English and Swedish, the use and correspondence of the generic pronouns one in English and man in Swedish are examined in a bidirectional English-Swedish translation corpus. The material demonstrates clearly the greater frequency and versatility of Swedish man and the restricted use of English one. The difference is partly register-related: while man is stylistically neutral one is relatively formal and often replaced by you or various other pronouns. However, the most striking difference is syntactic. The English correspondences of man cut across grammatical systems and can be seen to reflect two diverging tendencies: the English fiction texts often have a subject corresponding to Swedish man, but the non-fiction texts rely to a large extent on syntactic shifts and clause reductions without a corresponding subject. In other words, the difference between the languages is not just a matter of pronoun choice but of syntactic preferences and subject selection.

The lexical typological profile of a language is a crosslinguistically valid characterization of its lexical structure with particular focus on basic features which are language-specific. The paper deals with basic mental verbs in Swedish from this perspective based on data from translation corpora against the background of available information about typological patterns. A brief sketch is given of language-specific characteristics of the nuclear verb se ‘see’ which is the primary equivalent of English see but is also frequently used as an equivalent of look used as an activity verb (look at) and as a phenomenon-based verb (e.g. look happy). The extensive pattern of polysemy of the verb känna ‘feel’ is dealt with in detail and turns out to have several language-specific characteristics even in comparison with closely related languages such as German and English. Swedish veta is shown to have a more restricted extension beyond its basic meaning than its primary English equivalent know. English in this case appears to represent a more common pattern than Swedish judging from available typological data. A major section is also devoted to the semantic differentiation between the three basic verbs of thinking tänka-tro-tycka which represents one of the major language-specific characteristics of Swedish mental verbs.