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Kalbotyra
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1392-1517 - ISSN (Online) 2029-8315
Published by Vilnius University

[38 journals]

A corpus-driven analysis of structural types of lexical bundles in court
judgments in English and their translation into Lithuanian
- Authors: Donata Berūkštienė
  Pages: 7 - 31
  Abstract: Formulaicity is one of the characteristic features of legal discourse, which manifests itself not only at the level of wording, “but also in the content, structure and layout” of legal texts (Ruusila & Londroos 2016, 123). Formulaic language, which includes phrasal and prepositional verbs, idioms, collocations, lexico-grammatical associations, lexical bundles, etc., are building blocks of legal discourse shaping legal text meanings. However, up to now, far too little attention has been paid to the nature of frequently occurring “sequences of three or more words that show a statistical tendency to co-occur” (Biber & Conrad 1999, 183), i.e. lexical bundles, in different genres of legal texts. Most studies in the field of lexical bundles in legal texts have only been based on one language (e.g. Jablonkai 2009; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011; Breeze 2013), whereas translation-oriented contrastive studies on lexical bundles are lacking. In respect of the aforementioned gaps, the aim of this pilot study is to analyse structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union in English and to examine the way these structures are rendered into Lithuanian. To gain insights into the frequency and structure of lexical bundles, the present study uses the methodological guidelines of corpus linguistics. The classification of lexical bundles into structural types is based on the framework suggested by Biber et al. (1999, 2004). For the purpose of this study, a parallel corpus of court judgments was compiled comprising approximately 1 million words of original court judgments in the English language and about 8 hundred thousand words of court judgments translated into Lithuanian. Lexical bundles in this research were identified using the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc 3.4.4 (Anthony 2015). A concordance program AntPConc 1.2.0 (Anthony 2017) was employed to find Lithuanian equivalents of the most frequent lexical bundles identified in the English court judgments. The evidence from this study suggests that different structural types of lexical bundles have more or less regular equivalents in Lithuanian; however, in most cases, these equivalents tend to be shorter.
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11181
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)
Adverbs as evidentials: an English-Spanish contrastive analysis of twelve
adverbs in spoken and newspaper discourse
- Authors: Marta Carretero, Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Julia Lavid-López
  Pages: 32 - 59
  Abstract: This paper presents a contrastive analysis of six English evidential adverbs ending in -ly with their Spanish nearest translation equivalents, in spoken and newspaper discourse. The adverbs may be associated with varying degrees of reliability: high (clearly/claramente, evidently/evidentemente, obviously/obviamente), medium (apparently/al parecer) and low (seemingly/aparentemente, supposedly/supuestamente). The analysis is based on tokens of authentic language extracted from two contemporary corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA). The qualitative analysis focuses on the evidential functions of the adverbs and on their pragmatic interactional uses; the quantitative analysis centres on the relative frequency of type of evidential functions and the clausal position of the adverbs.
  The results uncover a number of differences between the English adverbs and their Spanish correlates and also between the two discourse types. Practically all the adverbs are strongly specialized in expressing either indirect-inferential or indirect-reportative evidentiality. English obviously and Spanish evidentemente show a high frequency of cases of loss of evidential meaning due to pragmaticalization, specifically in spoken discourse. Regarding position, the English adverbs are more frequent in medial clausal position, while some Spanish adverbs are often found in the more prominent parenthetical position.
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11185
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)
Criticism and politeness strategies in academic review discourse: a
contrastive (English-Italian) corpus-based analysis
- Authors: Giuliana Diani
  Pages: 60 - 78
  Abstract: Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this paper explores the mitigation strategies used to soften criticism in English and Italian book review articles in the disciplinary field of linguistics. Most corpus-based analyses on academic criticism have focused on the use and function of politeness strategies in English academic review genres, mainly book reviews. Recently, an increasing number of studies on academic book reviews have examined the issue from a cross-cultural perspective. This study attempts to contribute to the area of cross-cultural research on reviewing practices by exploring how criticisms are managed in a somewhat neglected review genre in academic discourse studies – the book review article. Criticisms will be identified on the basis of their lexico-grammatical features and further categorized into “direct” and “mitigated” (Itakura & Tsui 2011, 1369). The mitigation strategies identified in both language corpora mainly involve the use of sequences of speech acts such as praise-criticism, criticism-praise, criticism-suggestion, praise-suggestion, and hedging. However, their distributions reveal differences in the two languages. While praise is prominently used in both English and Italian book review articles, Italian-speaking linguistics reviewers employ a lower proportion of hedges than their English-speaking colleagues and are more likely to opt for suggestions as a form of indirect criticism. The results demonstrate that linguistics reviewers writing in English and Italian deploy a considerable range of linguistic devices when expressing mitigated criticism of peers. Their use and distribution are discussed in relation to national/cultural writing conventions, but also differences between “large” and “small” disciplinary cultures (Holliday 1999). Some implications for EAP learners and practitioners are also considered.
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11188
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)
‘A promise is a promise… but what about threats'’: an
English-Spanish contrastive analysis of the verbs promise-prometer and
threaten-amenazar
- Authors: Carmen Maíz-Arévalo
  Pages: 79 - 103
  Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate ‘I promise’ and its counterpart in (Peninsular) Spanish prometo. After briefly revisiting the theoretical debate on performativity and performative verbs, the paper adopts a corpus-based approach to quantify the main uses of ‘I promise’ in both languages. This contrastive analysis has an ultimate didactic purpose, since these verbs can raise problems of understanding and use for Spanish learners of English as a foreign language (EFL henceforth) and of translation studies. In order to carry out this analysis, the British National Corpus and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual were used, manually fine-graining the initial automatic search. To make both datasets comparable, only the oral and the fiction sections were considered since they are both shared by the two corpora. Interestingly, during the analysis there has also emerged an unexpected result which seems to be pointing out to the beginning of a linguistic change in Spanish. Thus, it can be observed that there is an emergent use in Spanish of the verb amenazar (‘to threaten’), sometimes with the action function of “promising”. This emergent use seems to be especially frequent in computer-mediated communication (e.g. blogs, forums, etc.) but it is still extremely rare in English.
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11191
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)
Bringing home the bacon! A contrastive study of the cognates bring/bringe
in English and Norwegian
- Authors: Signe Oksefjell Ebeling
  Pages: 104 - 126
  Abstract: This paper highlights the value of a bidirectional translation corpus in contrastive studies in an investigation of the cross-linguistic relationship between two cognates in English and Norwegian: bring and bringe. Although monolingual and bilingual dictionaries prove to be excellent sources of information in respect of this relationship, the present study contributes further to our knowledge regarding the cognates’ conditions of use. Drawing on material from the fiction part of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), the study reveals that English bring is far more frequent than its Norwegian counterpart. By exploring the close to 500 occurrences of the two words in original and translated texts, it becomes clear that the two verbs have a relatively low Mutual Correspondence. That is, overall, they only correspond to each other in translation in roughly 20% of the cases. This low correspondence rate is surprising, given the fact that we are looking at verbs stemming from the same origin in two closely related languages. The corpus correspondences suggest that there may be at least two main reasons for this. First, Norwegian bringe may be considered more formal than English bring and there is thus a preference for using less formal verbs in Norwegian to express the meaning of bring, notably the multi-word verbs ha med (REFL) ‘have with (REFL)’, ta med (REFL) ‘take with (REFL)’ and komme med ‘come with’. Second, English bring is more versatile than Norwegian bringe, particularly in the sense that it more readily forms part of phrasal verbs and fixed phrases. It is also the case that English bring has come to be used with a wider range of meanings than Norwegian bringe, as attested in the dictionaries consulted. These ‘extra’ meanings include ‘initiate legal action against someone’ and ‘force oneself to do something (unpleasant)’; however, neither of these meanings is particularly salient in the current data. The findings underline the role a parallel corpus such as the ENPC can play in shedding light on contrastive nuances that contribute to a broader understanding of cross-linguistic relationships.
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11193
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)
Evidential and epistemic adverbials in Lithuanian: evidence from
intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic analysis
- Authors: Anna Ruskan, Audronė Šolienė
  Pages: 127 - 152
  Abstract: In the recent decade the realisations of evidentiality and epistemic modality in European languages have received a great scholarly interest and resulted in important investigations concerning the relation between evidentiality and epistemic modality, their means of expression and meaning extensions in various types of discourse. The present paper deals with the adverbials akivaizdžiai ‘evidently’, aiškiai ‘clearly’, ryškiai ‘visibly, clearly’, matyt ‘apparently, evidently’ and regis ‘seemingly’, which derive from the source domain of perception, and the epistemic necessity adverbials tikriausiai/veikiausiai/greičiausiai ‘most probably’, būtinai ‘necessarily’ and neabejotinai ‘undoubtedly’. The aim of the paper is to explore the morphosyntactic properties of the adverbials when they are used as evidential or epistemic markers and compare the distribution of their evidential and epistemic functions in Lithuanian fiction, news and academic discourse. The data have been drawn from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian and the bidirectional translation corpus ParaCorpEN→LT→EN (Šolienė 2012, 2015). The quantitative findings reveal distributional differences of the adverbials under study across different types of discourse. Functional variation of the evidential perception-based adverbials is determined to a great extent by the degree of epistemic commitment, evidenced not only by intra-linguistic but also cross-linguistic data. The non-perception based adverbials tikriausiai/veikiausiai/greičiausiai ‘most probably’, būtinai ‘necessarily’ and neabejotinai ‘undoubtedly’ are the primary adverbial markers of epistemic necessity in Lithuanian, though some of them may have evidential meaning extensions. A parallel and comparable corpus-based analysis has once again proved to be a very efficient tool for diagnosing language-specific features and describing an inventory used to code language-specific evidential and epistemic meanings.
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11197
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)
English and Croatian citation practices in research articles in applied
linguistics: a corpus-based study
- Authors: Mirna Varga, Tanja Gradečak-Erdeljić
  Pages: 153 - 183
  Abstract: As a mandatory constituent of academic writing, citation allows writers to acknowledge other scholarsʼ work and to position their research against it, showing thus both contribution to previous knowledge and research novelty (Hyland 2004). Previous research has documented not only cross-disciplinary (Hyland 2004) but also cross-cultural variations, with a general tendency of Anglo-American writers to use more citations than writers of some other cultural backgrounds (Hyland 2005; Mur Dueñas 2009). By exploring the frequency, preferred types, and reporting structures of citations in two comparable sub-corpora of research articles in applied linguistics in English and Croatian, the present study aimed to provide an insight into the patterns of cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of academic citation. The corpus comprised 32 research articles that were sampled from the representative English- and Croatian-medium publications in applied linguistics and analyzed manually. The extracted instances of citations were categorized according to the pre-established taxonomies of the citation types (Swales, 1990) and reporting structures in academic writing (Thomson & Tribble 2001). The frequency analysis showed that the English writers used more citations as opposed to the Croatian writers, which is in line with previous cross-cultural research on the use of citations (Fløttum, Dahl & Kinn 2006; Mur Dueñas 2009). In both sub-corpora writers used more non-integral than integral citations, with the highest frequencies reported in the Introduction section of research articles. The overall findings point to the saliency of the congruent types of reporting structures in both citation formats across the two sub-corpora, with the human subjects being most frequently used in integral citations and non-reporting being the most frequent reporting structure in non-integral citations. However, in non-integral citations English writers used non-human subjects at a significantly higher frequency than Croatian writers, which suggests that in the English citations investigated more importance is placed on research activities than human agents. Whereas similarities in the use of citations between English and Croatian writers may be accounted for by the congruent disciplinary variable, the differences seem to be related to the specifics of a wider socio-cultural background in which academic writing is embedded.
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11199
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)
Corpora and corpus linguistics revisited: an interview with Karin Aijmer
- Authors: Jolanta Šinkūnienė
  Pages: 184 - 191
  Abstract: ...
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11202
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)
Flöck, Ilka. 2016. Requests in American and British English. A
contrastive multi-method analysis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
pp. 264.
- Authors: Carmen Maíz-Arévalo
  Pages: 192 - 197
  Abstract: ...
  PubDate: 2018-01-09
  DOI: 10.15388/Klbt.2017.11207
  Issue No: Vol. 70, No. 70 (2018)