- Home
- e-Journals
- Languages in Contrast
- Fast Track Listing
Languages in Contrast - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
-
-
Ways of knowing in Slavic : Towards a comparative history of ideas
Author(s): Barbara SonnenhauserAvailable online: 19 May 2025More LessAbstractExpanding on Carl Buck’s insight that the history of ideas is closely tied to the history of the words expressing them, this paper traces the interaction of language, culture and cognition on the example of the concept know and its lexification in Slavic, based on a sample of diachronically and synchronically aligned translations of the New Testament. Two exploratory analyses of the lexical preferences, the domains of conceptual transfer and their perceptual bases reveal characteristic differences in the choice of lexical means, slightly less for the underlying conceptual mappings and for their perceptual bases. The patterns disclosed do not correlate with the branches of Slavic, nor do they display a clear historical signal. Instead, they suggest a correlation with the cultural history of the New Testament translations. The results illustrate the relevance of a more-dimensional approach when comparing the lexical layer of languages.
-
-
-
English go and Norwegian gå : Lexicogrammatical patterns and translation paradigms
Author(s): Signe Oksefjell Ebeling and Hilde HasselgårdAvailable online: 25 April 2025More LessAbstractThis article investigates the cognate verbs go and gå in an English-Norwegian contrastive perspective. On the basis of bidirectional translation data, the study contributes new insight regarding their relatively low cross-linguistic correspondence rate. Although the verbs share many of their lexicogrammatical features, some notable exceptions are uncovered. English go seems to be semantically more flexible than gå in some of its uses, while Norwegian gå is arguably syntactically more versatile. As a consequence, the cross-linguistic relationship between the verbs is far from straightforward, and translations are clearly influenced by diverging polysemies and lexicogrammatical preferences.
-
-
-
Academic voice in the rhetorical construction of author identity : An intercultural rhetorical perspective
Author(s): Congjun MuAvailable online: 25 September 2024More LessAbstractThis paper compares the linguistic features contributing to the construction of academic voice in English, Chinese and Translation corpora consisting of 180 research article introductions (RAIs) in the fields of biology, geology, and technology. The study reveals significant differences in the strategies for constructing academic voice across languages. In comparison to the English Corpus, the Translation Corpus exhibits higher or nearly equal normalized frequencies of certain linguistic features, such as hedges, first-person pronouns, and passivizations. This pattern may suggest that Chinese authors project a less confident, less committed, and less interactive voice in academic English discourse. Moreover, the uncritical academic voice that emphasizes authority in Chinese-authored English RAIs may be attributed to their mother language background. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study for multilingual professional writing and the teaching of academic writing within the paper.
-
-
-
Corpus-based contrastive studies and AI-generated translations
Author(s): Signe Oksefjell EbelingAvailable online: 20 September 2024More LessAbstractThis article addresses the issue of using AI-generated translations to perform contrastive analysis. The aim is to establish whether bidirectional translation corpora (and by extension human translators) have become superfluous, given the success of AI-generated translations. To investigate this, results from a previous study of English bring and Norwegian bringe based on bidirectional data are compared with results from a study based on AI-generated data. The AI-generated translations show a markedly higher Mutual Correspondence between the verbs than the human translations. This AI-translation effect may give an inaccurate picture of how equivalent the verbs really are. In cases where AI and human translations deviate, the latter are characterised by semantically more specific verbs. The study highlights some features only available in bidirectional corpora, including the possibility of taking individual variation into account. The findings suggest that bidirectional corpora (and human translators) still have a role to play in contrastive studies.
-
-
-
Constraints and lexical conditioning in the dative alternation : A cross-linguistic analysis of English and Dutch
Author(s): Alexandra Engel, Elsy Andries, Laura Rosseel, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Freek Van de VeldeAvailable online: 20 September 2024More LessAbstractThis article presents a cross-linguistic variationist study of the dative alternations in English (I gave Tom a present vs. I gave a present to Tom) and Dutch (Ik gaf Tom een cadeau vs. Ik gaf een cadeau aan Tom). We use logistic mixed-effects regression and lasso regression to assess the probabilistic conditioning of dative choices as a function of morphosyntactic, semantico-pragmatic and lexical constraints in both languages. In addition, we test the predictive accuracy of our two language-specific models cross-linguistically. The results show a substantial overlap in the probabilistic constraints, but also a larger reliance on lexical content in Dutch compared to English, which suggests differences in complexity across the English and Dutch dative alternations. The methodology adopted in this study may pave a new way for comparative variational linguistics.
-
-
-
A contrastive analysis of (-)ish in English and Swedish blogs
Author(s): Karin AijmerAvailable online: 14 May 2024More LessAbstractThe aim is to investigate whether (-)ish is employed in the same structures and functions in English and Swedish blog data and to describe the adaptations and changes resulting from borrowing. (-)ish is exceptional because it looks like a suffix but can be taken out of its original context with adjectives and nouns and used as a clitic or an independent word. Based on samples from the two languages it is shown that there are quantitative differences with respect to the uses of (-)ish with different base forms and as a freestanding sentence-final item in the two data sets. The qualitative findings reveal that (-)ish has been borrowed in Swedish as a suffix, a clitic, as a qualifier with hedging function and as a sentence-final pragmatic marker. The change in the position of (-)ish is influenced by the existence of a domestic variant typ (‘sort of’, ‘kind of’) which can be placed more freely in the sentence than the English (-)ish.
-
-
-
Reflexivity patterns in West-Slavic languages : Between introversion, extroversion, and mutuality
Author(s): Martina IvanováAvailable online: 07 May 2024More LessAbstractThe aim of this paper is to analyse differences in reflexive coding in Slovak, Czech and Polish and to evaluate the factors responsible for using phonologically more or less complex reflexive markers. To address this issue, we looked at preferred reflexive coding strategies in Slovak, Czech, and Polish, relying on data extracted from InterCorp multilingual corpus. The results are then verified by data from monolingual corpora of investigated languages for one semantic group of verbs labelled as ‘Prevarication’ in FrameNet. The results show that semantic frame underlying the meaning of lexical items cannot be the only possible explanation for distribution of reflexive markers but there are also other semantic, syntactic and pragmatic factors playing a pivotal role in reflexive coding strategies, often unique for a given language.
-
-
-
A contrastive analysis of English deverbal -er synthetic compounds and their Italian equivalents
Author(s): Elisa MattielloAvailable online: 01 February 2024More LessAbstractThis study deals with English synthetic compounds ending in -er, such as heartbreaker, time-killer, and bodybuilder, and their Italian equivalents. Synthetic compounds are very productive in Germanic languages (e.g. E. heartbreaker, G. Herzensbrecher, D. hartenbreker), but virtually absent in Romance languages, where various morphological forms and word-formation strategies are used to render the same concepts (cf. It. rubacuori, Sp. rompecorazones, Fr. tombeur). The analysis of English synthetic compounds still remains a controversial topic in morphological accounts, with a lively theoretical debate between two mutually exclusive hypotheses, i.e. whether synthetic compounds have to be analyzed as derivations (i.e. [[heart break] [-er]]) or as compounds (i.e. [[heart] [break-er]]). In word-formation, they are part of transitional morphology, i.e. they have an ambivalent status between derivation and compounding. This study explores a collection of about 100 English synthetic compounds drawn from the English Lexicon Project database and compares them with their possible Italian renditions. The contrastive analysis mainly aims at highlighting differences between the two morphological systems (cf. E. time-killer/It. passatempo). Moreover, the study examines the translation procedures used to render English synthetic compounds in OPUS2 Italian. Corpus-based results confirm that English and Italian display language-specific constructions which may result in mis- or under-translation.
-