Languages in Contrast - Online First

Recent research on deictic elements has made extensive use of translation corpora to demonstrate that asymmetries between translational paradigms signal subtle contrasts from a systemic and pragmatic perspective. The purpose of the present study is to identify translation correspondences of the English spatial demonstrative this in Lithuanian and to discuss the contrastive features within the analytical framework of translational explicitation and implicitation. The results indicate that in the prototypical situational usage there is a high degree of correspondence between this and its Lithuanian translation, while textual uses demonstrate low formal equivalence. A tendency to implicitate stems from the null subject construction and object ellipsis in Lithuanian and is also a result of the availability of facultative deictic words in Lithuanian. The apparent systemic difference between the deictic systems of English and Lithuanian indicates a tendency towards optional implicitation and stylistic variation in literary translation.

This article examines the functional category of domain adverbials (DAs), which arose fairly recently in the European languages and is claimed to occur frequently in the written press. In order to better understand this category, we investigate the form, use and meaning of DAs in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish and highlight important intra- and cross-linguistic differences by means of a qualitative and quantitative empirical study based on a corpus of journalistic texts drawn from online daily newspapers. Our results show that cross-linguistically DAs are mainly realized as adverbs formed through a standard word-formation rule. Our results also point to important cross-linguistic differences in the frequency and types of domain adverbs used in the five languages. We explain these differences by taking into account grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse-related parameters.