Languages in Contrast - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2008

Seen from an interpersonal perspective, within the framework of Appraisal (Martin and White 2005), cleft constructions in English and Swedish function in the system of Engagement as a heteroglossic rhetorical device by which speakers and writers negotiate an authorial position for themselves while implicitly acknowledging the existence of alternative positions. The cleft clause opens up the utterance to heteroglossic negotiation by representing one of its clause elements as a semantic gap. The identity of the semantic gap is then identified by the clefted constituent in the superordinate clause. It-clefts and reversed wh-clefts have different clefting possibilities in English and Swedish, which means that it-clefts and reversed wh-clefts are used to negotiate different types of authorial positions.

This paper studies the verbs that result from contact between English and Yorùbá languages. Using data generated from informal discussions, it discusses two of the categories of lexical verbs in use in Yorùbá-English code-mixing. The first type, clean verbs, originate from each of the languages in contact and are interchangeable; the second type, hybrid verbs, is a creation that results from language contact. The study concludes that these features of the verb are part of the grammatical basis of the Yorùbá-English code-mixing.

This paper, using translation materials as data for analysis and based on Fillmore’s (1982) Frame Semantics Theory, presents a contrastive study of communication verbs in Chinese and English with respect to their representation of semantic components related to a communication event. In Talmy’s (1991) classification, Chinese and English fall into the same typological category as satellite-framed languages, where large numbers of verbs characteristically incorporate Manner with Motion, and the Path of motion is typically mapped onto a post-verb satellite. Previous contrastive studies of Chinese and English, however, have concluded that Chinese deviates from a typical satellite-framed language as represented by English with respect to both the conflation of Manner with Motion and the representation of the Path of motion. The present study, which examines, specifically, how communication verbs express speaking events in written narrative in Chinese and English, has found more intra-typological differences between the two languages in their representation of meanings in surface structures as well as in the narrative style in which words of a particular category are chosen for representing events. The major original findings from this study are that Chinese is by far more constrained than English in its encoding of semantic components in communication verbs, and that a translator may face a great challenge when doing Chinese-to-English translation with respect to the choice of appropriate communication verbs.

This paper presents a critical approach to the translation of cultural items in the Spanish dubbed version of the American sitcom Will & Grace. The paper starts with a presentation of domestication and foreignization (Venuti 1995). The former is discussed in connection with the choices made in the target texts. I, then, introduce the term “alienation” as another strategy used to render culture specificities. In the second section I examine the key comical elements present in the scripts, in which cultural allusions also play a significant role. Section three explores how these culturally anchored lexical items are rendered in the Spanish version, establishing a taxonomy that includes preservation of international items, preservation of culture-specific items, substitution with a different source-culture item, substitution with an international item, substitution with a target-culture item, substitution with corrupted forms of target-culture items and substitution with a superordinate. The use and translation of expletives as elements unique to a language and culture are also covered. The final section discusses the transition from domestication to alienation.

This article deals with a linguistic phenomenon which, in analogy with the well established term ‘pronominalization’, may be called ‘proverbalization’. In comparison with its counterpart in the nominal sphere, this phenomenon, despite its crucial importance to any language possessing the verb category, has received little attention in modern linguistic research. The article compares, synchronically and diachronically, the proverbal systems of English, French and Swedish. In order to obtain maximal analytic efficiency, by excluding factors not directly relevant to the purpose of the analysis, the article focuses on one particular case of proverbalization, namely the one in which it occurs in a comparative clause as a result of this clause having a verb identical to that of the main clause but taking an object different from that of the main clause verb: X – V1 – O1 – Comparative Connector – X/Y – V1 – O2.

Despite increasingly numerous works dealing with issues of information structure from a cross-linguistic perspective, contrastive information structure analysis is not an established field of research yet. The paper aims at showing that it is worthwhile staking out and exploring such a field. Starting off from a brief reminder of what information structure is, as conceived of by Lambrecht (1994), the paper proposes guiding questions that contrastive information structure analysis should strive to answer. It then turns to the discussion of an example of contrastive analysis which involves the information structural category of identifiability. It is argued that the variable x in the English formula ‘as for x’ and the corresponding German formula was x {(an)betrifft / angeht} in sentence initial position can only be instantiated by expressions that have identifiable discourse referents. Results of a corpus-based comparison of expressions which instantiate x in these English and German formulas are presented. These results show contrasts between English and German in the lexicogrammatical expression of identifiable referents that go beyond the better-known differences in the use of the definite article. A methodological point to be made is that Lambrechtian categories of information structure (identifiability and activation of discourse referents, focus structure) may serve as tertia comparationis for the analysis of contrasts on the lexicogrammatical level.