Languages in Contrast - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2006

This paper describes the design of a 192-text Spanish-English specialized corpus of biomedical research articles (RAs) divided into three 64-text subcorpora (English texts, their corresponding Spanish translations, and Spanish comparable texts) for use in quantitative contrastive analysis. The paper also presents an exploratory study analysing theme–rheme structure in these subcorpora. Two definitions of theme were used: Halliday’s ideational theme and preverbal theme (i.e., all clause constituents before the finite verb of the main clause). The study adopted a target-oriented approach and assessed the acceptability of the translated texts with regard to the statistical norm of the comparable native-speaker Spanish subcorpus. Statistically significant differences were found for marked theme and its different syntactic manifestations (prepositional phrase adjunct and subordinate clauses) and there was evidence of a different thematic distribution within the semantic category person (researcher, patient, first person). The most striking results were found for different measures of theme length, suggesting a consistent information overload in the thematic zone in the whole RA and in the individual rhetorical sections except for the Introduction. The translated texts occupy a kind of no-man’s land half-way between the source articles and the independently created Spanish RAs. A refined three-stage model of the study design is proposed for future target-oriented quantitative and qualitative research into translation.

The brand name is one of the most important devices for marketing a product. Western companies spend vast sums of money devising brand names that convey the positive characteristics of products marketed on the strength of their image. Many of the brand names patented are complex linguistic units, using aspects of phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and semantics to make names memorable. These names use language to impact on readers and therefore have transferable meanings. This article analyses the linguistic devices in a corpus of English language adverts and investigates which translation strategies are employed when the adverts are transferred into Russian. It argues that the transfer process is more complex than previous literature has suggested and that although the original meaning is often not maintained after transfer, brand names in the target adverts carry new connotations which are appealing due to the target audience’s expectations.

This study explores clause combining in English and French, with special emphasis on the relationship between and/et-coordination and subordination. More precisely, the claim that English shows a strong preference for coordination while French makes more intensive use of subordination is tested against bilingual corpus data, viz. a comparable corpus of original texts and a bidirectional translation corpus. The study shows that the number of shifts from coordination to subordination is higher in translations from English into French than in translations from French into English. This finding lends strong support to the initial hypothesis.

This article combines the corpus-based and contrastive approaches, seeking to provide a systematic account of passive constructions in two typologically distinct languages, namely British English and Mandarin Chinese. We will first explore, on the basis of written and spoken corpus data, a range of characteristics of passives in the two languages including various passive constructions, long vs. short passives, semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features as well as genre variations. On the basis of this exploration, passive constructions in the two languages are contrasted in a structured way. Methodologically, this study demonstrates that comparable monolingual corpora can be exploited fruitfully in contrastive linguistics.

Talmy’s (1985) typology proposes a classification of languages on the basis of their lexicalization patterns. All languages exhibit the tendency to code either manner or path of motion in the verb, and thus are divided accordingly into two main typological groups. The fact that languages code components of a motion event differently is therefore not a novelty, and it is only the point of departure in this paper. The aim here is to account for why these differences in lexicalization may occur. Many, if not all, languages make use of both patterns in expressions of motion events, and the reasons why one is more prominent and favoured than the other and on what occasions is the subject of the present discussion. Extensive data from Serbian/Croatian is presented in a contrastive setting in order to highlight the claim that the typology is best seen as a cline rather than a dichotomy. Two original hypotheses that explain the use of patterns in Serbian/Croatian are put forward, with the possibility to apply them further in analyses of other languages. It will be observed that the mechanism of lexicalization can be explained only after all the levels where meaning is conveyed in a language, namely morphology, syntax and semantics, are subjected to an analysis in a unifying fashion. Moreover, a network of the crucial spatial and temporal parameters is suggested here in order to distinguish event types and determine the language-specific means that reflect those event differences. Particular attention has been paid to a phase in motion events termed moment-of-change, which is notably absent from the relevant discussions in the literature. Another important contribution is the emphasis on the importance of deixis in the lexicalization of motion events, which has not been given the attention it deserves.