Pragmatic reproduction of cultural-linguistic referents in translation from Spanish to Chinese

Círculo de lingüística aplicada a la comunicación ◽

10.5209/clac.67933 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 81 ◽

pp. 137-152

Author(s):

Zhishuo Ding

Keyword(s):

Environmental Values ◽

Chinese Translation ◽

Linguistic Form ◽

Spanish Novel ◽

Context Dependent

This paper examines the pragmatic translation of cultural-linguistic items through a relevance-theoretic study. The results suggest: 1) implicative value of the cultural-linguistic items is context-dependent and 2) loss of the linguistic form might imply the loss of the implicit clue. The study aims to expose the pragmatic values conveyed by the cultural-linguistic elements of Spanish and its Chinese translation. Furthermore, it explores how much original Spanish linguistic elements are accessible to the target readers of the Chinese translation. Based on a Spanish novel, namely La Colmena, and its Chinese translation Feng Fang, linguistic cultural referents from the Spanish original and their translations were compared, considering their cognitive contexts. This research points to the fact that the cognitive-environmental values of cultural-linguistic elements are generally underestimated, especially in Spanish-to-Chinese translation and, a large number of Spanish linguistic items do not maintain their implicatures in the Chinese translation due to different contextual assumptions.

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The Linguistic Representations of Causing Events and Caused Events in Narrative Discourse

Cognitive Semantics ◽

10.1163/23526416-00101002 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 45-76 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Fuyin Li ◽

Jing Du ◽

Phillip Wolff

Keyword(s):

Mandarin Chinese ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Narrative Discourse ◽

Linguistic Form ◽

Video Clips ◽

Causative Constructions ◽

Linguistic Representations ◽

Context Dependent ◽

Set Up ◽

The Continuum

This article examines Talmyan claims on the order, linguistic form, and Figure/Ground alignment of causing events and caused events. Narratives are elicited from a set of 20 video clips of real situations. 50 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were interviewed to set up a closed corpus of 1000 causative sentences. It is found that the data fell into three major types: the causing events are represented prior to the caused event; the caused events are specified initially in bei-construction; the caused events appear independently. The results suggest that Talmyan claims about the morphosyntactic features of causative expressions are not universal. The patterns in which causal events are described appear to be language specific and context dependent. It is hypothesized that causative expressions are best characterized in terms of continuums: the continuum of causative constructions; the continuum of causative elements; the continuum of causing event; and the continuum of caused events.

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Kick-Starting Female Careers

Journal of Personnel Psychology ◽

10.1027/1866-5888/a000209 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 17 (4) ◽

pp. 193-203 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Tanja Hentschel ◽

Lisa Kristina Horvath ◽

Claudia Peus ◽

Sabine Sczesny

Keyword(s):

Word Pair ◽

Linguistic Form ◽

Gender Neutral ◽

Entrepreneurial Activities ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Relationship

Abstract. Entrepreneurship programs often aim at increasing women’s lower entrepreneurial activities. We investigate how advertisements for entrepreneurship programs can be designed to increase women’s application intentions. Results of an experiment with 156 women showed that women indicate (1) lower self-ascribed fit to and interest in the program after viewing a male-typed image (compared to a gender-neutral or female-typed image) in the advertisement; and (2) lower self-ascribed fit to and interest in the program as well as lower application intentions if the German masculine linguistic form of the term “entrepreneur” (compared to the gender-fair word pair “female and male entrepreneur”) is used in the recruitment advertisement. Women’s reactions are most negative when both a male-typed image and the masculine linguistic form appear in the advertisement. Self-ascribed fit and program interest mediate the relationship of advertisement characteristics on application intentions.

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Forming Impressions of Personality

Social Psychology ◽

10.1027/1864-9335/a000179 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 45 (3) ◽

pp. 153-163 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Sanne Nauts ◽

Oliver Langner ◽

Inge Huijsmans ◽

Roos Vonk ◽

Daniël H. J. Wigboldus

Keyword(s):

Impression Formation ◽

Context Dependent

Asch’s seminal research on “Forming Impressions of Personality” (1946) has widely been cited as providing evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect, suggesting that warmth-related judgments have a stronger influence on impressions of personality than competence-related judgments (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007 ; Wojciszke, 2005 ). Because this effect does not fit with Asch’s Gestalt-view on impression formation and does not readily follow from the data presented in his original paper, the goal of the present study was to critically examine and replicate the studies of Asch’s paper that are most relevant to the primacy-of-warmth effect. We found no evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. Instead, the role of warmth was highly context-dependent, and competence was at least as important in shaping impressions as warmth.

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Memorial Consequences of Environmental Context Change in Children and Adults

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169/a000056 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 57 (6) ◽

pp. 455-461 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Alp Aslan ◽

Anuscheh Samenieh ◽

Tobias Staudigl ◽

Karl-Heinz T. Bäuml

Keyword(s):

Elementary School ◽

Young Adults ◽

Episodic Memory ◽

Middle Childhood ◽

First Graders ◽

Fourth Graders ◽

Environmental Context ◽

Context Change ◽

Context Dependent

Changing environmental context during encoding can influence episodic memory. This study examined the memorial consequences of environmental context change in children. Kindergartners, first and fourth graders, and young adults studied two lists of items, either in the same room (no context change) or in two different rooms (context change), and subsequently were tested on the two lists in the room in which the second list was encoded. As expected, in adults, the context change impaired recall of the first list and improved recall of the second. Whereas fourth graders showed the same pattern of results as adults, in both kindergartners and first graders no memorial effects of the context change arose. The results indicate that the two effects of environmental context change develop contemporaneously over middle childhood and reach maturity at the end of the elementary school days. The findings are discussed in light of both retrieval-based and encoding-based accounts of context-dependent memory.

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