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Vom Umgang mit Diskurskonnektoren in Übersetzungen
Abstract
Vortrag
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My aim in this paper is to reassess the conceptual-procedural distinction as drawn in relevance theory in the light of almost thirty years of research. In Section 1, I make some comparisons between approaches to semantics based on a conceptual-procedural distinction and those based on a distinction between truth conditions and conditions for appropriate use. In Section 2, I present a brief history of the conceptual-procedural distinction as drawn in relevance theory. In Section 3, I consider the nature of procedural encoding and discuss whether it is best seen as semantic or pragmatic. In Section 4, I outline some parallels and differences between procedural and use-conditional accounts of interjections. In Section 5, I discuss the implications of the conceptual-procedural distinction for lexical pragmatics and consider some recent proposals about how it might be extended. In Section 6, I reassess the conceptual-procedural distinction in the light of current evolutionary approaches to cognition and point out some future directions for research.
Rhetorical Structure Theory is a descriptive theory of a major aspect of the organization of natural text. It is a linguistically useful method for describing natural texts, characterizing their structure primarily in terms of relations that hold between parts of the text. This paper establishes a new definitional foundation for RST. The paper also examines three claims of RST: the predominance of nucleus/satellite structural patterns, the functional basis of hierarchy, and the communicative role of text structure.
This paper discusses the semantics of the connective but. Two trends of analyses are compared: ones based on a notion of formal contrast and others that are inferential. First, the formal contrast approaches are evaluated with respect to a certain number of problematic examples. I argue that they encounter insurmountable issues, and that an inferential account is needed. However, the way the inference required in those latter accounts is drawn needs to be defined in a restricted way. I propose to use the probabilistic interpretation of the notion of argumentation to carry this out. It is argued that to be interpreted, but needs an argumentative goal that is debated by its conjuncts. In the absence of an explicit goal or one that can be deduced by world-knowledge, the goal must be abduced from the content of the but conjuncts alone by taking their information structure into account. My proposal for but is then shown to interact with that of other particles: too, only and yet.
Additions and omissions of connectives (e.g. conjunctions, connective adverbs, etc.) are a frequent phenomenon in translation. The present article reports on a study whose aim was to elucidate translators' motivations for performing such shifts, focusing on the addition of connectives. The study was carried out on a bidirectional parallel corpus containing translations of business texts between English and German. Connective additions and omissions were identified, counted and analyzed taking into account the surrounding linguistic context of the shift in question, possibly associated shifts performed by the translator, alternative translation options, etc. It was found that the vast majority of identified shifts were attributable to previously established English-German contrasts in terms of syntax, lexis, and communicative norms. The findings suggest that it is unnecessary to assume that translators follow a “universal strategy of explicitation, as it has often been done in the literature (cf. e.g. Blum-Kulka's Explicitation Hypothesis).
The importance of discourse markers (words like 'so', 'however', and 'well') lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. They are regarded as being central to semantics because they raise problems for standard theories of meaning, and to pragmatics because they seem to play a role in the way discourse is understood. In this new and important study, Diane Blakemore argues that attempts to analyse these expressions within standard semantic frameworks raise even more problems, while their analysis as expressions that link segments of discourse has led to an unproductive and confusing exercise in classification. She concludes that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.
Explicitation and Implicitation in Translation. A Corpus-Based Study of English-German and German-English Translations of Business Texts
- Viktor Becher
Becher, Viktor (2011a). "Explicitation and Implicitation in Translation. A
Corpus-Based Study of English-German and German-English
Translations of Business Texts". Diss. University of Hamburg.
Becher, Viktor (2011b). "When and Why Do Translators Add
Connectives?: A Corpus-Based Study". In: Target. International
Journal of Translation Studies 23.1, S. 26-47.