Languages in Contrast - Online First

The present paper investigates similarities and differences between Czech and Spanish regarding the (non-)expression of pronominal subjects (PS). The nature of this comparative study is qualitative, and its central question is whether Czech and Spanish use the same strategies for omission and expression of PS. Previous research describes both Czech and Spanish as consistent pro-drop languages, and at first glance their strategies for (non-) expression of PS are identical. However, in certain structures, Czech allows overt pragmatic as well as grammatical expletives, a feature which – in combination with several further structural properties – substantially distinguishes it from Spanish. The differences that may emerge when comparing two languages leads automatically to a discussion of the typology of pro-drop languages.

The aim of this paper is to analyse introductory sections in Italian, British/Irish and American city audio guides from a contrastive perspective, in order to identify possible differences in the type and distribution of content. Three main content types and their corresponding subtypes were identified in the introductions of fifty professional city audio guides and were both quantitatively and qualitatively compared across the three groups. Differences between audio guides in Italian and in English are identified and discussed in reference to Hall’s ‘contexting’ theory ( 1983 , 1990 ), and the findings are then compared to existing guidelines for audio guides production provided by scholars and professionals in the field. Finally, on the basis of the results, translation issues are addressed by providing a list of aspects that could be taken into account when producing English versions of Italian audio guides.

This paper analyzes the use of the -ing and -ndo forms in English and Spanish in sales contracts. More specifically, it aims to answer three questions: 1. Do the -ing and the -ndo forms occur more frequently in sales contracts than in general language? 2. Do English sales contracts contain more -ing forms used in more syntactic functions than the Spanish -ndo in Spanish sales contracts? 3. Are both the -ing forms and the -ndo forms found in all or most parts of the sales contracts retained for this study? Our study is based on two comparable corpora of English and Spanish: a legal corpus containing sales contracts, and a general corpus. Our corpora provide the following answers to the questions posed: 1. Both the -ing and the -ndo forms occur more frequently in sales contracts than in general language; 2. There are more -ing forms in English sales contracts than there are -ndo forms in Spanish sales contracts, but in both cases, they are used in a variety of syntactic functions; 3. Both the -ing forms and the -ndo forms are found in most parts of the sales contracts used in this study.

The present paper studies the English presentative semantic pattern whose function is to introduce a new phenomenon into the discourse, relating it to an already established location. A contrastive (English-Czech) cross-linguistic corpus-assisted approach is applied to explore syntactically diverse forms which represent the same presentative semantic pattern: ‘location – presentation verb – new phenomenon’. We focus on English sentences in which the location is expressed syntactically as the subject. The English constructions with a locative subject were detected as translation counterparts of Czech sentence-initial locative adverbials realized by prepositional phrases. Our study demonstrates that the potential of the sentence to introduce a new phenomenon in discourse is primarily based on the semantics of the verb.