Languages in Contrast - Current Issue

The choice between the future constructions will/shall and BE going to is among the most well-investigated topics in English linguistics. A host of semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic factors has been suggested to drive the alternation between these constructions. Recent research has taken a contrastive perspective and investigated whether similar factors also apply to Norwegian, which shows a very similar alternation (skal/vil vs. kommer til å). This paper follows up on this line of research, taking new data into account. Drawing on the Open American National Corpus (OANC) and the Spoken BNC2014 for English on the one hand and the NoTa corpus as well as the Big Brother corpus for Norwegian, we carve out commonalities and differences between the alternation patterns in English and Norwegian, and we argue that in both languages, it may actually be semantic, rather than structural, aspects that play the most crucial role in language users’ choice between competing future constructions.

The study investigates the translation correspondence of Czech, Polish, and French converbs (transgressive, imiesłów przysłówkowy, and gérondif), using extensive data extracted from parallel corpora of fiction. Although the three converbs share significant syntactic and semantic properties (in terms of the range and proportion of different meanings conveyed), they differ in frequency and in stylistic characteristics (archaistic in Czech). The study shows that these differences are reflected in the proportion of the convergent translation counterparts, independently of the source language (more than 65% of convergent counterparts in translations into Polish, about 30% in translations into French, and only about 6% in Czech). The analysis of target languages showing high proportion of divergent counterparts (French and Czech) reveals that the distribution of their types is shaped by the meaning of the source converb: distinction between accompanying circumstance vs. more informative meanings in Czech, and participant- vs. event-oriented content in French. This research advances our understanding of the expression of adverbial subordination across languages and demonstrates the research potential of parallel corpora, used as semantic and functional mirrors revealing distinctions within seemingly uniform categories in source languages.

This study investigates the translation strategies for the negated counterparts of yǒu rén ‘there is someone, there are people’ in a parallel corpus composed of Chinese-to-English aligned narrative texts. It specifically explores the distinction between existentials and presentationals in negative contexts. The analysis shows that negative existentials convey human absence in a given location, with the English translation often thematizing the location and implicitizing the human entity to varying degrees. The study contributes to the debate on whether presentationals can be negated, arguing that while negative presentationals do not introduce discourse referents, they express the occurrence of nonevents tied to spatiotemporal coordinates just like events. These sentences often establish Set-Member relationships with discourse-old groups, visible in English translations through partitive nouns (e.g., none, no one of them) or referring expressions referencing the Set (e.g., they, everyone). In other instances, negative presentationals convey counterexpectational meaning, indicating the non-occurrence of an expected event. In all cases, negative presentationals are thus strongly tied to the cotext and cannot be uttered “out of the blue”

This study offers a reanalysis of embedded exclamative constructions as true exclamative, and even as mirative, items. Through a quantitative study of the constructions and the verbs that licence them in English and French, it is demonstrated that not only do these embedded constructions resemble their non-embedded counterparts, their conventional meaning is not over-ruled by a matrix clause but rather projected by it.

In many languages, an argument external to a nominal can be interpreted as a possessor of that nominal. Korean and Spanish both have such constructions, but the external possessors contrast in their case features, grammatical functions, distribution, and semantic properties (e.g. alienability). This paper develops a Construction Grammar account that treats external possessors as unselected arguments licensed through a conventional implicature.

Languages show variation in the encoding of plurality in the domain of foodstuffs. Some foodstuffs are lexicalized by singular mass nouns (e.g., garlic) and others by plural count nouns (e.g., beans). In the paper it is argued on the basis of German and Russian that there is no difference in meaning between these two forms: both denote aggregates as clusters of objects. Since objects are built into clusters, they are inaccessible for counting and both types of nouns uniformly behave like mass nouns. Such a uniform behavior would be unexplainable if these forms differed in meaning and the plural form were a regular count plural. This investigation suggests that two types of plural have to be distinguished: the mass aggregate plural, which indicates a clustered plurality of objects, and the count plural, which designates sets of disjoined objects. Regular plural markers may in principle be ambiguous between these two interpretations. However, if a plural marker is attached to a singulative or unit-denoting morpheme of a noun, the plural is unambiguously interpreted as count plural. The mass aggregate plural may receive a special morphological marking in some languages, as in Russian.