Equivalence (?) in Translation: Exploring Timelines

In this paper we present two small sets of ‘comparable bilingual’ and ‘parallel text’ corpora (Bernardini et al. 2003) composed of Greek and English web-based European Union timelines. Drawing on time thematisation in European Union texts (cf. Sidiropoulou 2004) and assuming that, with this temporal anchoring (Chen 2003), timelines in particular may unravel more or less iconically (cf. Calfoglou to appear), we explore opening entry word order patterns in the two languages. The complexity of the image obtained is discussed and differences between the two sets of data are considered in relation to establishing translation equivalence in the genre.

Lexical typology : a programmatic sketch

The present paper is an attempt to lay the foundation for Lexical Typology as a new kind of linguistic typology.1 The goal of Lexical Typology is to investigate crosslinguistically significant patterns of interaction between lexicon and grammar

Asymmetric syntactic patterns in German-Dutch translation : a corpus-based study of the interaction between normalisation and shining through

The present study investigates how opposing translation universals (explanatory devices) as normalisation and shining through interact with each other. More particularly, we want to find out whether it is more likely to observe instantiations of shining through or (over-)normalisation in translations of contemporary literary fiction and whether the likelihood of these three explanatory devices varies according to translation direction. On the basis of a bidirectional comparable corpus of Dutch and German literary fictional texts (1975-2010), we investigated a case of syntactic variation that exists in both languages, viz. prepositional phrase (PP) placement. In both languages, a PP can be placed either in the middle field or in the postfield, but German presents a more outspoken preference for the middle field, thus making PP placement ideal for an investigation of the interaction between shining through and (over)normalisation. The results of the analyses show that (i) there is a strong form of shining through present in Dutch texts translated from German and (ii) a strong form of normalisation in German texts translated from Dutch. These results confirm Toury’s hypothesis that a less prestigious language such as Dutch is more tolerant towards higher frequencies of linguistic features which are typical of highly prestigious source languages as German than the other way around

Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage

Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and equivalent similarities obtained from the typological features of the native languages. We leverage this finding to recover native language typological similarity structure directly from ESL text, and perform prediction of typological features in an unsupervised fashion with respect to the target languages. Our method achieves 72.2% accuracy on the typology prediction task, a result that is highly competitive with equivalent methods that rely on typological resources.Comment: CoNLL 201

Predicting Native Language from Gaze

A fundamental question in language learning concerns the role of a speaker's first language in second language acquisition. We present a novel methodology for studying this question: analysis of eye-movement patterns in second language reading of free-form text. Using this methodology, we demonstrate for the first time that the native language of English learners can be predicted from their gaze fixations when reading English. We provide analysis of classifier uncertainty and learned features, which indicates that differences in English reading are likely to be rooted in linguistic divergences across native languages. The presented framework complements production studies and offers new ground for advancing research on multilingualism.Comment: ACL 201

Color naming reflects both perceptual structure and communicative need

Gibson et al. (2017) argued that color naming is shaped by patterns of communicative need. In support of this claim, they showed that color naming systems across languages support more precise communication about warm colors than cool colors, and that the objects we talk about tend to be warm-colored rather than cool-colored. Here, we present new analyses that alter this picture. We show that greater communicative precision for warm than for cool colors, and greater communicative need, may both be explained by perceptual structure. However, using an information-theoretic analysis, we also show that color naming across languages bears signs of communicative need beyond what would be predicted by perceptual structure alone. We conclude that color naming is shaped both by perceptual structure, as has traditionally been argued, and by patterns of communicative need, as argued by Gibson et al. - although for reasons other than those they advanced

Semantic form as interface

The term interface had a remarkable career over the past several decades, motivated largely by its use in computer science. Although the concept of a "surface common to two areas" (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 1980) is intuitively clear enough, the range of its application is not very sharp and well defined, a "common surface" is open to a wide range of interpretations