Languages in Contrast - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2007

This paper studies the lexical-pragmatic processes of narrowing and broadening of conceptual content in the relation between original texts and their corresponding translations in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) from a relevance-theoretic point of view. It is suggested that, in at least some cases, translations can be seen as a kind of mirror reflecting the pragmatic processes at work in lexical interpretation. A translator may choose to render an underspecified concept encoded in a source text by a word that more closely encodes the interpretation given to the concept in question, in which case the semantics/pragmatics distinction (as it applies to the source text) will be made explicit in the relation between source and target text. In other cases, the comparison of source and target text shows that similar lexical encodings in the two languages do not necessarily provide the same possibilities for lexical broadening.

This paper reports on a study designed to assess the influence of the pragmatic Principle of Informativeness on the translatorial strategy of explicitation. It replicates a previous study on the occurrence of conjunctional augmentation of English present participle free adjuncts in a monolingual corpus (Kortmann 1991), with a database of translation instances from English into Catalan. The study aims at testing the validity of Kortmann’s scale of informativeness of semantic / discourse relations (e.g. Condition, Cause, Simultaneity, etc.) as a (partial) account of explicitation by means of sentence and discourse connectives. The methodology is text-based and involves collecting a database of pairs of sequences (English source text, Catalan translation), identifying the most plausible interpretation between free adjunct and matrix clause, and classifying them into instances that have undergone explicitation vs. non-explicitation. The data are analysed quantitatively (by finding the percentages of explicitation per relationship) as well as qualitatively (by analysing the kinds of semantic shifts that occur between source texts and translations).

This article addresses two main questions: Can connectors be properly translated and can ‘contrastive network analysis’ be used both as a heuristic tool and for language-specific analyses? My key example being the French connector donc, I first propose a description of this connector within the framework of ‘connector grammar’. Based on a study of professional translations of donc into a number of languages, I then show that it is bound by instructions to a particular ‘function domain’ which is probably used intuitively by translators, and I proceed to discuss how function domains may be circumscribed. Network analysis may be used to this end, and I show the results of a recent experiment involving this method. These results turn out to raise a new series of problems, and I consider the possibility of resolving some of these by a combination of network analysis and Dyvik’s (1998 a and b) ‘semantic mirrors’ analysis.

The present paper focuses on the communicative roles of three discourse markers, na, (n)so and nanso, in Akan, a Niger Congo (Kwa branch) language. (N)so is an additive focus marker. Its use gives the addressee an indication that the (n)so-utterance ought to be processed within a parallel context provided by the immediately preceding utterance. It highlights the fact that the kind of parallel context that licenses the use of (n)so is much more lenient than is the case for the use of its English equivalent also/too. Significantly, an explanatory relation is among the inferential relations that may arise as a result of the use of the clausal coordinating connective na, a situation which is not permissible in the case of its English counterpart and. The contrastive marker nanso, much like its English counterpart but, signals that the proposition expressed in a following utterance is contrary to what is to be expected. It is suggested that specific language-internal facts ought to be recognized and accounted for within the pursuit of a general cognitive theory of utterance interpretation.

This paper presents a corpus study of right dislocation (RD) in Catalan and discusses crosslinguistic differences of information packaging between English and Catalan. The Catalan corpus consists of 93 RDs which have been coded according to three parameters: (1) the point where the entity in the right-dislocated constituent had appeared in the discourse, (2) consequences of eliminating the right-dislocated constituent and (3) consequences of restoring the canonical order. I argue that RD in Catalan is a means to structure information in a coherent way by displacing old information from the main clause. Three main types of RDs can be found: (1) RDs which activate an entity which was no longer accessible in the discourse and make it highly salient, while still marking its discourse-old status; (2) RDs which make explicit an implicit, never textually mentioned, referent and places it in a discourse-old information position. (3) RDs referring to entities mentioned in the previous sentence. Such RDs convey an additional meaning, some ‘emotional content’, having to do with the expression of opposition or emphasis. In order to analyse crosslinguistic differences, an English text and its Catalan translation have been used. The Catalan translation contained 42 instances of RD, while the English text contained none, which shows that the two languages use different strategies to encode information packaging. The Catalan translation uses RDs mostly in cases in which the English original repeats the same phrase in two consecutive utterances and in utterances which convey contrast or opposition.

This article discusses the textual functions of demonstratives in German and Russian in terms of ‘discourse topicality’ and ‘proximity’, thus covering a broad range of referential phenomena within a unified approach. It shows that — in spite of important grammatical differences between German and Russian — anaphoric and deictic uses of demonstratives are ruled by the same principles in both languages.

Explicitness or implicitness as assumed properties of translated texts and other texts in multilingual communication have for some time been the object of speculation and, at a later stage, of more systematic research in linguistics and translation studies. This paper undertakes an investigation of explicitness/implicitness and related phenomena of translated texts on the level of cohesion. A corpus-based research architecture, embedded in an empirical research methodology, will be outlined, and first results and possible explanations will be discussed. The paper starts with a terminological clarification of the concepts of ‘explicitness’ and ‘explicitation’ in terms of dependent variables to be investigated. The two terms — and their usage by other scholars — will be discussed. An electronic corpus will then be described which provides the empirical data and techniques for information extraction. For the investigation carried out using our corpus, indicators will then be derived on the basis of which operationalizations and hypotheses can be formulated for patterns of explicitation occurring between source and target texts. Some initial results relating to cohesive explicitness and explicitation in the data will be presented and discussed, with particular attention being paid to the areas of ‘reference’, ‘substitution‘, ‘ellipsis’, ‘conjunction’, and ‘lexical cohesion’. First attempts will also be made at explaining the findings.

Coreference is one essential strategy of coherence and cohesion as it establishes connectivity in texts. This connection is evoked by linguistic devices on the text surface but has to be interpreted mentally as a relation between extralinguistic referents. Since translators are concerned with the reception of connectivity in source texts and the production of the same kind of connectivity in target texts coreference is an important process taking place in translation. The present paper deals with the elaboration of a method for investigating nominal coreference in originals and translations. In order to build parameters for the empirical analysis of coreference in English and German corpora we provide an overview over various mechanisms affecting the creation of coreference relations in source and target texts. We take account of linguistic as well as extralinguistic aspects as interdependent and interacting factors potentially causing shifts in coreference. The model we establish on the basis of these considerations allows us to investigate nominal coreferring expressions as well as analyse the relation of reference identity created between these expressions. Hence, our model facilitates exhaustive research on a very fine-grained scale. It allows us to capture differences on the lexicogrammatical as well as on a semantic and conceptual level and, thus, paves the way for interpretation on a more conceptual level.