Aiming for Cognitive Equivalence – Mental Models as a Tertium Comparationis for Translation and Empirical Semantics

This paper introduces my concept of cognitive equivalence (cf. Mandelblit, 1997), an attempt to reconcile elements of Nida’s dynamic equivalence with recent innovations in cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, and building on the current focus on translators’ mental processes in translation studies (see e.g. Göpferich et al., 2009, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 2010; Halverson, 2014). My approach shares its general impetus with Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s concept of re-conceptualization, but is independently derived from findings in cognitive linguistics and simulation theory (see e.g. Langacker, 2008; Feldman, 2006; Barsalou, 1999; Zwaan, 2004). Against this background, I propose a model of translation processing focused on the internal simulation of reader reception and the calibration of these simulations to achieve similarity between ST and TT impact. The concept of cognitive equivalence is exemplarily tested by exploring a conceptual / lexical field (MALE BALDNESS) through the way that English, German and Japanese lexical items in this field are linked to matching visual-conceptual representations by native speaker informants. The visual data gathered via this empirical method can be used to effectively triangulate the linguistic items involved, enabling an extra-linguistic comparison across languages. Results show that there is a reassuring level of interinformant agreement within languages, but that the conceptual domain for BALDNESS is linguistically structured in systematically different ways across languages. The findings are interpreted as strengthening the call for a cognition-focused, embodied approach to translation

Implicit Arguments in English and Rutooro: A Contrastive Study

The present study is a contrastive analysis of the syntactic behavior of verbs that are ontologically specified for objects but these objects may be left out without rendering sentences ungrammatical. The study unveils asymmetries between English and Rutooro (a Bantu language spoken in Uganda) in the (non-)omissibility of postverbal arguments, stemming from lexico-semantic and morphological factors as well as syntactic and discoursal factors. In light of the asymmetries arising from syntactic and discoursal factors, the study adopts a typology of indefinite implicit arguments that categorizes them into two: general indefinite implicit arguments and discourse-bound indefinite implicit arguments. Denotational nuances between synonyms as well as morphological specifications are also crucial linguistic ingredients that trigger variability in the syntactic behavior of synonymous verbs intralinguistically and cross-linguistically. In order to formalize the syntactic behavior of the verbs involved, the study employs the analytical tools provided by Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). While Asudeh/Giorgolio (2012) use a combination of LFG and Glue Semantics in order to account for the occurrence of implicit arguments, this study proposes an alternative approach, by using only the LFG functional specifications in the lexical entries of the verbs under consideration without having recourse to an auxiliary framework. Using Bresnan (1978) as a point of departure and informed by proposals advanced by Nordlinger/Sadler (2007), the study posits a non-ambiguous bistructural analysis, with the postverbal argument instantiating the specification ± higher structure – a feature that caters for the (non-)omissibility of the postverbal argument

Human-Level Performance on Word Analogy Questions by Latent Relational Analysis

This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation, machine translation, and information retrieval. Relational similarity is correspondence between relations, in contrast with attributional similarity, which is correspondence between attributes. When two words have a high degree of attributional similarity, we call them synonyms. When two pairs of words have a high degree of relational similarity, we say that their relations are analogous. For example, the word pair mason/stone is analogous to the pair carpenter/wood; the relations between mason and stone are highly similar to the relations between carpenter and wood. Past work on semantic similarity measures has mainly been concerned with attributional similarity. For instance, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) can measure the degree of similarity between two words, but not between two relations. Recently the Vector Space Model (VSM) of information retrieval has been adapted to the task of measuring relational similarity, achieving a score of 47% on a collection of 374 college-level multiple-choice word analogy questions. In the VSM approach, the relation between a pair of words is characterized by a vector of frequencies of predefined patterns in a large corpus. LRA extends the VSM approach in three ways: (1) the patterns are derived automatically from the corpus (they are not predefined), (2) the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is used to smooth the frequency data (it is also used this way in LSA), and (3) automatically generated synonyms are used to explore reformulations of the word pairs. LRA achieves 56% on the 374 analogy questions, statistically equivalent to the average human score of 57%. On the related problem of classifying noun-modifier relations, LRA achieves similar gains over the VSM, while using a smaller corpus

Феномен синкретизма в украинской лингвистике

У сучасній лінгвістиці вивчення складних системних зв’язків та динамізму мови навряд чи буде завершеним без урахування синкретизму. Традиційно явища транзитивності трактуються як поєднання різних типів утворень як результат процесів трансформації або відображення проміжних, синкретичних фактів, що характеризують мовну систему в синхронному аспекті.In modern linguistics, the study of complex systemic relations and language dynamism is unlikely to be complete without considering the transitivity. Traditionally, transitivity phenomena are treated as a combination of different types of entities, formed as a result of the transformation processes or the reflection of the intermediate, syncretic facts that characterize the language system in the synchronous aspect.В современной лингвистике изучение сложных системных отношений и языкового динамизма вряд ли будет полным без учета синкретизма. Традиционно явления транзитивности трактуются как совокупность различных типов сущностей, сформированных в результате процессов преобразования или отражения промежуточных синкретических фактов, которые характеризуют языковую систему в синхронном аспекте