Paracompositionality, MWEs and Argument Substitution

Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the expression. Radically lexicalized theories of grammar that avoid string-, term-, logical form-, and tree-writing, and categorial grammars that avoid wrap operation, make predictions about the categories involved in verb-particles and phrasal idioms. They may require singleton types, which can only substitute for one value, not just for one kind of value. These types are asymmetric: they can be arguments only. They also narrowly constrain the kind of semantic value that can correspond to such syntactic categories. Idiomatically combining phrases do not subcategorize for singleton types, and they exploit another locally computable and compositional property of a correspondence, that every syntactic expression can project its head word. Such MWEs can be seen as empirically realized categorial possibilities, rather than lacuna in a theory of lexicalizable syntactic categories.Comment: accepted version (pre-final) for 23rd Formal Grammar Conference, August 2018, Sofi

Engleski višerječni glagoli s česticom OUT i njihovi hrvatski pandani

This paper focuses on the multi-word verbs with the particle out not only by covering important theoretical aspects of those verbs, but also by analysing them, testing them and comparing them with their Croatian counterparts. The term ‘multi-word verb’ indicates a combination of a verb with either one or more particles – prepositions and adverbs and can be further narrowed down by saying it breaks down into phrasal, prepositional and phrasal prepositional verbs. A synecdoche ‘Phrasal verb’ is sometimes used to denote the whole domain of the multi-word verbs because phrasal verbs are the most widely spread group of the three mentioned above. Due to its idiosyncratic meaning phrasal verbs often pose challenges when it comes to translating them and can therefore complicate the learning process of the non-native speakers. The analysis of the verbs extracted from the book The Time Traveler’s wife authored by Audrey Niffenegger is presented in the corpus of the present paper and shows just how indirect translation into Croatian the multi-word verbs demand

Engleski višerječni glagoli s česticom OUT i njihovi hrvatski pandani

This paper focuses on the multi-word verbs with the particle out not only by covering important theoretical aspects of those verbs, but also by analysing them, testing them and comparing them with their Croatian counterparts. The term ‘multi-word verb’ indicates a combination of a verb with either one or more particles – prepositions and adverbs and can be further narrowed down by saying it breaks down into phrasal, prepositional and phrasal prepositional verbs. A synecdoche ‘Phrasal verb’ is sometimes used to denote the whole domain of the multi-word verbs because phrasal verbs are the most widely spread group of the three mentioned above. Due to its idiosyncratic meaning phrasal verbs often pose challenges when it comes to translating them and can therefore complicate the learning process of the non-native speakers. The analysis of the verbs extracted from the book The Time Traveler’s wife authored by Audrey Niffenegger is presented in the corpus of the present paper and shows just how indirect translation into Croatian the multi-word verbs demand

A corpus-based study of Italian idiomatic phrases: from citation forms to 'real-life' occurrences

In the current paper we present a typological description of the alternative forms and variations which Italian idiomatic phrases were found to take in a corpus of contemporary written Italian. We were concerned above all with lexical variation, both regularly occurring and occasional, not with the syntactic flexibility of idioms. Flexible search parameters were used in order to locate as many variations as possible, including alternative lexical components, shortened forms of idioms, adaptation of underlying metaphors, and alternative syntactic realizations. We relate our findings to lexicographical description

Subtitling of collocational patterns in children's animated movies: a corpus-based study

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês: Estudos Linguísticos e Literários, Florianópolis, 2015.Abstract : Due to technological innovations and to globalization, the translation of movies, or more specifically, audiovisual translation, has become an ever more common type of translation. However, most of the studies in the area focus on the technicalities involved in the activity, not taking into account the linguistic aspects of translation (Díaz Cintas & Remael, 2007). For that reason, little is known about the challenges and limitations of subtitling, and this area is constantly a target of criticism on its so called ?quality? (Carvalho, 2007). Following a descriptive approach (Toury, 2012), this research aims at uncovering the translation strategies (as defined by Chesterman, 1997; Pedersen, 2005; and Costa, 2014) used by subtitlers while rendering certain language patterns, namely collocations, from American English into Brazilian Portuguese. It takes on the methodological apparatus of corpus-based studies as they enable the processing of large quantities of data quickly and automatically. The corpus is made up of three children?s animated movies (Ice Age, Shrek and Toy Story), the subtitles of which were inserted in COPA-TRAD (Fernandes & Silva, 2013) ? a translation parallel corpus ? and analyzed following Pedersen?s (2005) classification of translation strategies for cultural expressions in subtitles. It was found that, most of the time, subtitlers will attempt to maintain the cultural expression in the translation or, at least, maintain its meaning, despite facing difficulties when dealing with puns and wordplay. In this sense, it can be attested that subtitlers were overall creative and innovative, possibly because of the movie genre they were working on ? animation. These results also show the unfounded nature of the criticism usually aimed this type of audiovisual translation.Graças aos avanços tecnológicos e à globalização, a tradução de filmes, ou mais especificamente, a tradução audiovisual, se tornou um tipo de tradução cada vez mais comum. No entanto, a maior parte das pesquisas feitas na área foca nas tecnicalidades envolvidas nessa atividade, sem levar em conta os aspectos linguísticos da tradução (Díaz Cintas e Remael, 2007). Por esse motivo, não se sabe muito sobre os desafios e as limitações da legendagem, e não raro esta área é alvo constante de críticas relacionadas à sua  qualidade (Carvalho, 2007). Seguindo uma abordagem descritivista (Toury, 1995), espera-se descobrir as estratégias de tradução (como definidas por Chesterman, 1997; Pedersen, 2005; e Costa, 2014) utilizadas por legendadores na tradução de determinados padrões linguísticos, ou colocações, do inglês americano para o português brasileiro. A metodologia aplicada é a dos estudos com base em corpus, já que estes permitem o processamento de grandes quantidades de dados de maneira rápida e automática. O corpus é composto por três filmes infantis de animação (A Era do Gelo, Shrek e Toy Story), cujas legendas foram inseridas no COPA-TRAD (Fernandes e Silva, 2013)  um corpus paralelo de tradução  e analisadas seguindo a classificação de estratégias de tradução de expressões culturais em legendas de Pedersen (2005). Descobriu-se que, na maioria das vezes, os legendadores tentam manter a expressão cultural na tradução ou, ao menos, manter seu significado, apesar de enfrentarem dificuldades ao lidarem com trocadilhos e jogos de palavras. Nesse sentido, pode-se afirmar que os legendadores foram em geral criativos e inovadores, possivelmente devido ao gênero dos filmes em que trabalharam  animação. Esses resultados mostram também a natureza infundada das críticas que são geralmente direcionadas a esse tipo de tradução audiovisual

Idiomatic Expressions in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban

The paper argues that the quality of idiom translations depends on the appropriate strategy used while translating them because idiomatic expressions cannot be translated from their words. This study was carried out to describe the meaning of the idiomatic expression and the application of Chesterman's strategies in translating idioms and identify the speech acts of the utterances conveyed by the speaker in the data. This research used a descriptive qualitative method. The data were gathered from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The study also used their Indonesian version to find out the translation of the idiomatic expressions. One hundred five quotes were taken from the novels. As a result, Unit Shift appears more frequently in the novel as a syntactic strategy followed by Scheme Change. Furthermore, in terms of semantic approach, distribution Change is the most common strategy that emerges from the novels, followed by Trope Change. The Assertive Act is the most dominant act delivered by the speaker behind the utterances in speech acts

A call for the environment: A bilingual corpus-driven analysis of creative language in online texts by WWF and Greenpeace

Since its development as a discipline in the 1980s, environmental communication has sought to inform and warn people about the threats and issues that concern nature and wildlife by providing an accurate representation of them. There are a variety of actors and media that have contributed to spread such communication and raise awareness about environmental issues, both on a local and a global level. In order to reach even lay people and to fulfil their persuasive purpose, environment texts have undergone a process of popularisation and have exploited every linguistic resource, including the most creative ones. This dissertation aims at investigating the use of creative solutions in environment texts published by two environmental organisations, namely, WWF and Greenpeace. This investigation was carried out by designing a comparable corpus, consisting of online texts in Italian, British English and American English found in the websites of such NGOs. The study focused on the titles and subheadings of those texts, which were classified and grouped according to the type of lexical creativity they contain. The analysis showed that only a minority of cases included traditional figures of speech and idiomatic expressions that maintained their original form and meaning, as the majority contained manipulations at the semantic, structural, or phonological level. These deformations concerned collocations, idioms, and even quotes of famous books, songs, films, and other cultural or intertextual references. However, the most used device in the corpus turned out to be wordplay, followed by the exploitation of the polysemy of words that is generated in a particular context. Overall, it was observed that what affects the choice towards a creative device rather than another is not the general topic but the specific content of that text

EPIE Dataset: A Corpus For Possible Idiomatic Expressions

Idiomatic expressions have always been a bottleneck for language comprehension and natural language understanding, specifically for tasks like Machine Translation(MT). MT systems predominantly produce literal translations of idiomatic expressions as they do not exhibit generic and linguistically deterministic patterns which can be exploited for comprehension of the non-compositional meaning of the expressions. These expressions occur in parallel corpora used for training, but due to the comparatively high occurrences of the constituent words of idiomatic expressions in literal context, the idiomatic meaning gets overpowered by the compositional meaning of the expression. State of the art Metaphor Detection Systems are able to detect non-compositional usage at word level but miss out on idiosyncratic phrasal idiomatic expressions. This creates a dire need for a dataset with a wider coverage and higher occurrence of commonly occurring idiomatic expressions, the spans of which can be used for Metaphor Detection. With this in mind, we present our English Possible Idiomatic Expressions(EPIE) corpus containing 25206 sentences labelled with lexical instances of 717 idiomatic expressions. These spans also cover literal usages for the given set of idiomatic expressions. We also present the utility of our dataset by using it to train a sequence labelling module and testing on three independent datasets with high accuracy, precision and recall scores

Difficulties EFL Jordanian University Students Encounter in Translating English Idioms into Arabic

This study aimed at investigating the difficulties that Jordanian EFL University students encounter in translating English idioms into Arabic. The participants of the study were all M.A translation students at Yarmouk University and the University of Jordan who were selected purposefully. The total number of the students who participated in the translation test which contains 16 idioms of different categories was 90.  The quantitative findings of the study revealed that EFL Jordanian university students encountered difficulties in translating English idioms into Arabic. Keywords: Difficulties, EFL translation students, Translating idiom