For Pete’s sake!

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Signe Oksefjell Ebeling ◽  
Jarle Ebeling
Keyword(s):  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
The Cross

In this paper we present a contrastive analysis of two similar-looking patterns in English and Norwegian that may be said to express the same meanings. Both English “for * sake” and Norwegian for * skyld have been attested with the following meanings: purpose, consideration and annoyance (used as an expletive). An analysis of bidirectional translation corpus data reveals marked cross-linguistic differences in the frequency and use of the patterns, contributing to a fair amount of non-correspondence in translation between the two languages. The in-depth contrastive analysis undertaken confirms that the two patterns behave differently in the two languages: while English prefers the expletive use, Norwegian prefers the purpose use. This observation regarding the patterns’ conditions of use led to the conclusion that the two languages operate with two different extended units of meaning, and that the two patterns as such are not considered perfect translation equivalents of each other. It was therefore interesting to take a closer look at one of the patterns — the English expletive use — and its actual correspondences in Norwegian. The cross-linguistic investigation uncovers some evidence of “quasi-swearing” in the translated texts and some evidence of different ways of swearing in English in Norwegian, both in terms of how expletives are lexicalized and what they refer to, e.g. blasphemy or sexual blatancy.

The construction of attitudinal stance

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Pérez Blanco
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Descriptive Data ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Analysis Methodology ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Working Procedure

This paper is a corpus-based contrastive study of the realization of negative attitudinal stance in English and Spanish discourse through the use of evaluative adjectives. The main aim of the study is to analyse and compare the grammatical patterns in which negative evaluative adjectives occur in each language and discuss the observed cross-linguistic differences in terms of the effects that alternative linguistic realizations have in the construction of evaluative discourse. The working procedure follows a contrastive analysis methodology: description of empirical data, juxtaposition and contrast. The descriptive data have been extracted from a large comparable corpus of English and Spanish newspaper opinion discourse. The study has revealed interesting similarities and differences in the construction of Attitude in each language, which are inferred by contrasting its surface structural features.

Emotions travelling across cultures

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-46
Author(s):  
Annalisa Baicchi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Cognition ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Italian Language ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Language Pair ◽  
The Way ◽  
Emotion Language

Abstract This article examines the ‘Adj em +PP’ construction in the English-Italian language pair (e.g., angry at my audacity/arrabbiato per la mia audacia) with the aim of identifying the kinaesthetic embodied schemas that motivate the language of emotions. The analysis of corpus data highlights the interplay between culture and mind, and the cross-linguistic comparison offers some interesting observations that appear to undermine some stereotypes about the way in which emotions are conceived of in the two cultures. Comparative semantics foregrounds the non-diagrammatic rendition in the translation of emotion language and allows for typological hypotheses about cultural cognition and the connection between Talmy’s dichotomy of manner-framed and path-framed languages.

Three Perspectives on Swedish Indefinite Determiners

2002 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joakim Nivre
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Formal Semantic ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Swedish Data ◽  
The Way

This article investigates the meaning and use of singular indefinite determiners in Swedish, in particular the way in which the existential determiner någon/något contrasts with the indefinite article en/ett in different contexts. The problem is approached from three different perspectives, the first being a contrastive Scandinavian perspective, where the Swedish data are reviewed in the light of contrastive data from the closely related languages Danish and Norwegian. Secondly, corpus data are used to substantiate the results of the contrastive analysis both quantitatively and qualitatively. The last section adopts a more theoretical perspective and tries to present a formal semantic analysis of the two determiners under study, drawing on typological work on indefinites and studies of the historical development of indefinite determiners.

scholarly journals Vajon in Translated Hungarian

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-41
Author(s):  
Andrea Götz
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Markers ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Discourse Marker ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Linguistic Approach

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of the structures the discourse marker vajon forms in translated Hungarian fiction. Although translation data has been deployed in the study of discourse markers (Aijmer & Simon- Vandenbergen, 2004), such studies do not account for translation-specific phenomena which can influence the data of their analysis. In addition, translated discourse markers could offer insights into the idiosyncratic properties of translated texts as well as the culturally defined norms of translation that guide the creation of target texts. The analysis presented in this paper extends the cross-linguistic approach beyond contrastive analysis with a detailed investigation of two corpora of translated texts in order to identify patterns which could be a sign of translation or genre norms impacting the target texts. As a result, a distinct, diverging pattern emerges between the two corpora: patterns of explicit polarity show a marked difference. However, further research is needed to clarify whether these are due to language, genre, or translation norms.

Naming Patterns and Inductive Inference: The Case of Birds

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrzej Tarlowski
Keyword(s):  
Inductive Inference ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Feature Weighting ◽  
Stable Category ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Taxonomic Class ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractAlthough past research demonstrated that online presentation of labels plays a role in inductive inference few studies have shown that naming practices affect stable category representations that enter into inductive judgments. In this study we provide evidence for a relationship between naming and inductive inference by examining Polish and Spanish speakers’ inferences within the taxonomic class Aves. Birds in Polish are named with one label, ptak, while Spanish uses two labels, ave and pájaro. Size is the feature that determines whether Spanish speakers label a bird as ave or pájaro. As a result, compared to Polish speakers, Spanish speakers attach higher weight to bird size. This is evidenced by the fact that Spanish speakers’ perception of strength of inferences from birds decreases more strongly as a function of size dissimilarity between premise and conclusion. The hypothesis that feature weighting mediates in the influence of naming on induction is supported by the cross-linguistic differences in perceptions of animal similarity. The set of findings reported here contributes to the understanding of inductive inference and the relationship between language and thought.

Prosodic abilities in Spanish and English children with Williams syndrome: A cross-linguistic study

2011 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
PASTORA MARTÍNEZ-CASTILLA ◽  
VESNA STOJANOVIK ◽  
JANE SETTER ◽  
MARÍA SOTILLO
Keyword(s):  
Williams Syndrome ◽  
Spanish Version ◽  
Speech Communication ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Typically Developing Children ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Mental Age ◽  
The Cross

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to compare the prosodic profiles of English- and Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS), examining cross-linguistic differences. Two groups of children with WS, English and Spanish, of similar chronological and nonverbal mental age, were compared on performance in expressive and receptive prosodic tasks from the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech–Communication Battery in its English or Spanish version. Differences between the English and Spanish WS groups were found regarding the understanding of affect through prosodic means, using prosody to make words more prominent, and imitating different prosodic patterns. Such differences between the two WS groups on function prosody tasks mirrored the cross-linguistic differences already reported in typically developing children.

scholarly journals Quasi-ekwiwalenty związków frazeologicznych w teorii, frazeografii i translatoryce

2009 ◽  
pp. 323-346
Author(s):  
Joanna Szerszunowicz ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Target Language ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Source Language ◽  
Bilingual Dictionaries ◽  
Potential Problems ◽  
The Cross

Confrontative analyses show that some phraseological units have full equivalents, i.e. the units are similar in terms of form, semantics and stylistics, also called total equivalents. In fact, if a multi-aspectual confrontative analysis is conducted, it is it is hardly possible to find two units in the source language and the target language which are identical in all respects. They are bound to differ, for instance in frequency or gender restrictions. The paper presents the typology of quasi-equivalents, i.e. equivalents of phraseological units tra- ditionally called full or total equivalents, between which subtle differences are determined in a multi-aspectual analysis covering a number of criteria. As to the cross-linguistic differences, they manifest themselves in semantics, stylistics, variations, connotations and collocability of the phraseological units at issue. Another problem discussed is the phraseographic description of such units in bilingual dictionaries. Translation of units at issue is also discussed briefly in the paper to present potential problems and provide practical solutions. The choice of an appropriate cross-linguistic equivalent belonging to the group discussed depends on how subtle differences are actualized in a given context

A Contrastive Analysis of Japanese and Chinese ‘Laughter’ Onomatopoeia and Mimetic Words

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yihui Xia ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sound Symbolism ◽  
Japanese Language ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Chinese Texts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Japanese Translation

In the Japanese language, onomatopoeic words occupy an indispensable part of the lexicon. In particular, mimetic words used for laughing are the most iconic words. Some scholars point out that the alternation of phoneme type or manners of articulation are the expression of emotional overtones (Tamori 2002). For instance, the simple vowel /a/ conveys ‘cheerful, nice and pleasant laughs,’ while the constriction vowel /o/ signifies ‘more feminine and graceful.’ However, only a few studies focus on the symbolism of Chinese sounds in mimetic expressions. Therefore, further exploring the sound symbolism of Chinese mimetic words becomes essential. The principal purposes of this thesis are: 1) To explore the sound symbolism of onomatopoeia for laughing, which may help identify the differences between vowels; 2) to examine the relationship between the characteristics of onomatopoeia and the elements of culture in regard to the morphological and grammatical aspects of Japanese and Chinese. The sentences were collected from the corpus for Sino-Japanese translation. Consequently, it was found that 401 Japanese texts consisted of 155 onomatopoeias and 246 mimetic words; 281 Chinese texts consisted of 251 onomatopoeias and 30 mimetic words. Established from the collected corpus data, the sound and meaning of the words containing /a/ and /ei / in Chinese onomatopoeia and mimetic words were alike to those of the Japanese /a/ and /e/. Notably, Japanese texts containing the vowel /u/ are incredibly similar to Chinese texts that contain the vowel /i/. Although most Japanese onomatopoeia and mimetic expressions function as adverbs, this trend is not maintained in Chinese translations, and the use of verbs and adjectives is more frequent.

Cross-Linguistic Variation in the Layered Structure of PP

2020 ◽  
pp. 191-217
Author(s):  
Hisako Takahashi
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Layered Structure ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Case Morphology ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Parallel Pattern ◽  
Principled Account ◽  
Nominal Morphology

This chapter provides a novel observation concerning cross-linguistic variation regarding NP-ellipsis (henceforth NPE) inside articulated PPs and considers its theoretical implications. It first shows that although NPE is equally available in nominals in English, Chinese, and Japanese, the parallel pattern breaks down when NPE takes place within PPs. This study proposes a principled account of the cross-linguistic variation in question on the basis of (i) the layered internal structure of PPs, (ii) the syntactic reflection of fusional/non-fusional case morphology, and (iii) a phase-based analysis of ellipsis. The proposed analysis correctly predicts not only the availability of NPE within PPs but also one without PPs in English, Chinese, and Japanese. This chapter also provides theoretical implications for the role of phases in ellipsis and the cross-linguistic differences in nominal morphology.

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