Meaning Through Language Contrast

In four parts, this title deals with: grammaticalization; metaphor in contrast; cross-cultural pragmatics and speech acts; and the semantics/pragmatics boundary - theory and applications.

These volumes contain selected papers from the Second International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, in September 2000. They include papers on negation, temporality, modality, evidentiality, eventualities, grammar and conceptualization, grammaticalization, metaphor, cross-cultural pragmatics and speech acts and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. There are contributions by, amongst many others, Les Bruce, Ilinca Crainiceanu, Thorstein Fretheim, Saeko Fukushima, Ronald Geluykens, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Klaus von Heusinger, K. M. Jaszczolt, Susumu Kubo, Akiko Kurosawa, Eva Lavric, Didier Maillat, Márta Maleczki, Steve Nicolle, Sergei Tatevosov, L. M. Tovena, Jacqueline Visconti and Krista Vogelberg.

Experience in translation does not always correlate with the quality of the target text. Also, the evaluations of translation work vary considerably among evaluators. Why not shifting the focus of attention from the final translation to the underlying translation process when assessing translation competence? Iryna Kloster applies a multi-method approach to model the translation competence based on empirical parameters, such as gaze behavior, dictionary use, revisions as well as subjective evaluations of comprehension and translation difficulty. Eye tracking, keystroke logging, screen recording and retrospective interviews were applied to collect data in the experimental groups consisting of novice and semi-professional translators. As a consequence, the author suggests using language contrasts for researching translation competence. She draws conclusions based on hypotheses testing, provides justification by triangulating quantitative and qualitative data and discusses the results in the light of empirical translation studies as well.

Within cognitive and functional approaches to language structure and grammaticality, analogy and contrast represent two fundamental human cognitive capacities, which, up to now, have mostly been examined separately. This volume seeks to bridge that gap and in doing so it brings together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical research in the field. The chapters in this book examine analogy and contrast across a variety of languages (English, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian), for different language phenomena (constructions, lexical semantics, morphology, sentence structure, text organization), and with the use of various methods (corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, experimental methods, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis). This state-of-the-art research presented in the book should be of interest to specialists within Cognitive Linguistics, corpus linguistics, construction grammar, discourse analysis, translation studies, metaphor research, and cross-cultural research.

Combining the fields of phraseology and contrastive analysis, this book describes how patterns, defined as recurrent word-combinations with semantic unity, behave cross-linguistically. As the contrastive approach adopted in the book relies on translations and a bidirectional corpus model, the first part offers an in-depth discussion of contrastive linguistics, with special emphasis on using translations as tertium comparationis and a parallel corpus as the main source of material. Central to the contrastive analysis is the use of corpus-linguistic methods in the identification of patterns, while a deeper understanding of the phraseological nature of the patterns is closely related to the concept of extended units of meaning. The second part of the book presents five case studies, using an easy-to-follow step-by-step method to illustrate the phraseological-contrastive approach at work. The studies show that patterns weave an intricate web of meanings across languages and demonstrate the potential of exploring patterns in contrast.

This volume explores various hitherto under-researched relationships between languages and their discourse-cultural settings. The first two sections analyze the complex interplay between lexico-grammatical organization and communicative contexts. Part I focuses on structural options in syntax, deepening the analysis of information-packaging strategies. Part II turns to lexical studies, covering such matters as human perception and emotion, the psychological understanding of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’, the development of children’s emotional life and the relation between lexical choice and sexual orientation. The final chapters consider how new techniques of contrastive linguistics and pragmatics are contributing to the primary field of application for contrastive analysis, language teaching and learning. The book will be of special interest to scholars and students of linguistics, discourse analysis and cultural studies and to those entrusted with teaching European languages and cultures. The major languages covered are Akan, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish.

"This collection of papers on contrastive semantics and pragmatics has developed out of talks given at the Third International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at the ... Hongkou Campus of Shanghai International Studies University ... in 2005."--