Languages in Contrast - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2007

The present study aims at offering a contrastive analysis framework for the specific textual patterns of the expert-to-expert communicative setting from a semantic and a functional approach. Our methodology tries to identify patterns of behaviour in one of the genres that might be said to be exclusive of expert-to-expert discourse in medicine: abstracts. By means of describing regularities, differences in the way information is distributed will be pinpointed. Since textual realizations have been agreed to bridge the distance between the semantic and the functional component, cohesion will be analyzed both as a semantic marker and as an indicator of information distribution — pragmatic marker — according to functional constraints. ‘Ad hoc’ comparable and translation corpora have been built, extracted from medical journals with a significant impact. Intra and interlingual analysis of those corpora has been carried out to attain a comprehensive description of textual patterns from the above mentioned semantic, formal and functional parametrical levels.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a corpus-based contrastive study on a semantic function — restriction — and their applicability to translation. A number of restrictive elements in the two languages involved, English and Spanish, have been selected as search words and their behaviours have been analyzed on the basis of their textual environments. Apart from an overall description of meanings and uses, the article aims at verifying a linguistic hunch: cognates and also word-forms coming from the same lexeme were intuitively considered to differ more than might be expected, which has altogether been proved by the data found. Finally, a series of correspondences are suggested as translational options into Spanish for the most frequent uses and co-occurrences of the English elements.

The Dutch, German and French languages display a variety of regularly used connectives all of which introduce causes, arguments or reasons, such as Dutch omdat, want and aangezien, German weil, denn and da, and French parce que, car and puisque. Why should these languages have different connectives to express the notion of backward causality? The central argument developed in this article is that the use of these connectives is dependent on the degree of subjectivity associated with the causal relation. The pre-eminence of this account with respect to prior accounts of the uses of these connectives is established on the basis of a series of corpus analyses. The outcomes show that the degree of subjectivity of the main participant involved in the causal relation strongly predicts the occurrence of one or another connective. A distinction can be made between objective connectives like omdat and doordat, parce que and weil on the one hand and subjective connectives like want and aangezien, car and puisque and denn and da on the other hand. No differences between the subjective connectives aangezien/want, puisque/car and denn/da could be observed in terms of subjectivity, but additional frequency data and analyses of translation practices revealed promising directions for supplementary explanations.

French sur and Dutch op (“on, upon”) can be a considered matching pair when they are used as prepositions: e.g. le livre sur la table/het boek op de tafel (“the book on the table”). However, used as prefixes, or in particular as preverbs, the similarities between sur- and op- seem to be much weaker. Instead, sur- corresponds more often to over-: e.g. surestimer quelque chose/iets overschatten (“to overestimate something”). From the analysis of a bilingual dictionary, we will investigate this phenomenon. At a morpho-syntactic level, on the one hand, we will show that French and Dutch preverbs appear in different types of constructions. At the semantic level, on the other hand, we will demonstrate that prepositions in preverbal use can develop new, often aspectual, meanings, but that this re-semanticization process does not necessarily follow the same paths in French and Dutch.