Languages in Contrast - Online First

This 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.

This 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.

The 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.

This 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.