Languages in Contrast - Online First

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.

Evaluative constructions involving tough-predicates (e.g., This hill is difficult to climb) present atypical structure-to-meaning mappings and vary across languages: in some languages (e.g., English/French), speakers typically use so-called tough-constructions (TCs) in which the syntactic subject of the matrix sentence is logically the missing object of the infinitive; in others (e.g., Russian), speakers opt for a variety of functional analogues (e.g., passive, impersonal constructions). The aim of this paper is to explore English TCs involving difficult and easy adjectives, compare them to French and Russian analogues based on a parallel-corpus, and investigate how specific semantic properties (animacy, transitivity, adjective scope) relate to specific (more or less compact) configurations. The results show that French and Russian have similar functional analogues and only partially share the structural properties of English TCs. The findings support a multidimensional account based on the inherent semantic properties of evaluative constructions and their degree of compactness.

The 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.

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.

The present study examines the fate of the neoclassical combining form pseudo- in eight European languages, belonging to Germanic (Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish) and Romance (French, Italian, Spanish). In order to gain a better understanding of the synchronic morphological behaviour and productivity of pseudo- words in these languages, we carry out a cross-linguistic corpus analysis and compare the morphological and distributional properties of pseudo-. We also analyse its debonding behaviour and categorical flexibility in the set of languages and correlate this property with its productivity. The results of the corpus study are discussed against the typological background of the so-called Germanic and Romance Sandwiches.