Contragram

Newsletter 11

No 11
October - 1997


CONTENTS

The TNP-subgroup on "dictionaries": a brief introduction.

Filip Devos

The European Language Council

The European Language Council (ELC), created with financial support from the European Commission (DG XXII), is a new, permanent and independent European association, the main aim of which is "the quantitative and qualitative improvement of knowledge of the languages and cultures of the European Union and beyond".
 
The decision to create this permanent forum for the area of languages was a direct result of the June 1995 Stockholm Evaluation Conference, which was jointly organised by the SIGMA Scientific Committee on Languages and the European Commission.
 
The ELC has a key role to play in policy-making at a European level. Its main objective is "to create the framework and conditions necessary for common policy development and provide a platform for the launching of joint projects specifically designed to bring about real improvement." Wolfgang Mackiewicz of the Freie Universität Berlin is the project coordinator.
 
The ELC's first major initiative was the application for a Thematic Network Project (TNP) under the SOCRATES- ERASMUS Programme of the European Commission. The project will run over a period of 3 years, with 10 subprojects operating in the areas addressed by the ELC Policy Groups (amongst which "dictionaries", "multilingualism" and "language teacher training and bilingual education"). Each subproject is designed to "assess the current situation in the field, outlining strengths and weaknesses on the basis of changing social and professional needs; identify measures and methods designed to meet the demands of the social, economic and professional environments of Europe; develop strategies for the large-scale implementation of the measures envisaged."
 
The official launching conference of the ELC and the evaluation of the first year's work of the TNP were held at the Université Charles de Gaulle (Lille III) on 3-5 July 1997. The theme was "Language studies in a multicultural and multilingual Europe."

 

The TNP subgroup on dictionaries

The ELC contains a number of "policy groups" addressing the key issues in the area of languages identified in the National Reports that were presented and discussed at the Stockholm Conference. One of these subgroups is "dictionaries." The TNP subgroup on dictionaries has a scientific committee consisting of 11 members (chair: Dr. Reinhard Hartmann (Exeter), deputy chair: Dr. J. Van Keymeulen (Gent)) and 12 corresponding members, amongst which Contragram.
 
During the first year, there were 4 meetings of the subproject scientific committee. The objective for Year One was to survey the dictionary scene in various countries of Europe in order to determine the level of "dictionary awareness." This has been achieved in the form of National Reports and their evaluation in terms of 5 aspects of the field, i.e. cultural lexicography, pedagogical lexicography, multilingual and bilingual lexicography, computational lexicography and terminological lexicography. During the second year, a survey will be carried out on the five aspects of lexicography mentioned above.

Some results of the Final Report for Year One are given below:

  • research on dictionary use must go hand in hand with improvements in programmes for raising the level of dictionary awareness;
  • a European perspective for higher education may help to demonstrate the wide discrepancies between practices in different countries and the common goal of improving dictionary skills;
  • explicit instruction in dictionary reference skills should be introduced in all foreign language courses;
  • a rapprochement between language teachers and dictionary makers (via a "pedagogical lexicography") should be actively promoted;
  • descriptions and comparisons of existing dictionary training schemes and associated "workbooks" should be encouraged;
  • a start must be made to promote interaction between language teachers and dictionary publishers.

For year II, two meetings of the Scientific Committee are planned at Exeter, as well as an Open Workshop at Gent on "Dictionaries for foreign language learning" (14th March 1998). In line with the recommendations of the Final Report for Year One, the workshop will try and promote interaction between language teachers and dictionary publishers. More information on this workshop will follow. More information on the ELC and the TNP subgroups, including the full policy papers, can be found at URL:

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~elc/

 

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INTERSECT: Parallel Corpora and Contrastive Linguistics.

A project at the University of Brighton

Raphael Salkie

 

The beginning

Contrastive linguistics started for me with Vinay & Darbelnet's classic 1958 book Stylistique comparée du français et de l‘anglais. I discovered this book as an undergraduate student and fell in love with it (I have since met many people who cherish the book as I do, including hard-nosed theoreticians and grizzled generative veterans). Vinay & Darbelnet propose that French tends to express ideas in a more abstract way than English, and that this fundamental difference between the two languages accounts for many of the specific differences between a text in one language and its translation into the other. There are two significant things about their work:

1. The use of (good) translations as data.
2. Their willingness to propose hypotheses about general, systematic differences between languages.

The book has serious weaknesses, not surprising in a pioneering work: the evidence presented is anecdotal in the sense that there is no attempt to assess the frequency of the data they discuss (or its importance in relation to other problems of translation); and Vinay & Darbelnet do not provide a theoretical framework which might impose constraints on the phenomena that can vary across languages. Similar criticisms can be made of Van Hoof (1989), the most consistent attempt to continue the approach pioneered by Vinay & Darbelnet; Van Hoof's book is delightful and frustrating for the same reasons.

France

Over a decade later I came across Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher's Syntaxe comparée du français et de l'anglais (1981). Not only was the title similar to that of my earlier love, but Guillemin-Flescher had the strengths of Vinay & Darbelnet without their weaknesses: she used a well-articulated theoretical framework - the theory of "Opérations Enonciatives" developed by Antoine Culioli (cf. Culioli, 1990). The book used authentic translation examples throughout, the major source being Flaubert's Madame Bovary and two translations into English - but also including a vast range of other sources, literary and non-literary.

In the mid-eighties I was fortunate to spend a year working at the University of Poitiers, where I was privileged to meet Hélène Chuquet and Michel Paillard (the authors of a text book Approche linguistique des problèmes de traduction: anglais <-> français which draws on the same framework as Guillemin-Flescher) and Jean Chuquet (co-author of Grammaire et textes anglais: guide pour l'analyse linguistique, which applies Culioli's theories in detail to English grammar). Chuquet & Paillard made extensive use of articles from the French newspaper Le Monde and their translation in Guardian Weekly, and I promised myself that if the opportunity ever arose to collect large quantities of such texts they would be a good source of data for contrastive linguistics.

Later the opportunity indeed arose, but let me first conclude the French part of this narrative. Claims about major, systematic differences between English and French - the kind of claim pioneered by Vinay & Darbelnet and developed in the books mentioned above - continue to be commonplace in French universities. A recent French textbook, described as  "une initiation à la pratique raisonnée de la traduction", gives an appropriate caution and then makes the following claims:

SOME GENERAL CONTRASTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF FRENCH AND ENGLISH

(i)  Concreteness (plan du réel) in English vs. abstractness (plan de l'entendement) in French.
(ii)  More simplification and homogeneity in English
(iii) More frequent use of nominal constructions in French.
(iv) More frequent use of the passive in English.
(v) The reflexive is more widely used in French.
(vi) English more synthetic, French more analytic.
(vii) Derivational morphology is more regular in English.
(viii) Greater use of discourse markers in English. (Petton 1996: 24-6)

These are interesting and useful claims - if they are correct. What we need are a theoretical framework within which to situate such claims, and empirical material with which to investigate them.

Zimbabwe

From 1991 to 1993 I worked in Zimbabwe, and the Guardian Weekly became a regular part of my life.  Not only did it bring news from back home, but because it was bundled with the South African Weekly Mail, it provided a blow-by-blow account of the final dramatic dismantling of Apartheid which was taking place at the time and which had huge consequences for everyone in that part of the world. And every issue included four pages of articles translated from Le Monde. I carefully collected these in case I could obtain the original French articles when I returned to England. At the same time I began to use the Longman Mini-concordancer and an early version of Microconcord as vital tools in the preparation of my book Text and Discourse Analysis.

 

The corpus

Back in England I discovered that Le Monde was now available on CD-rom. Shortly afterwards Michael Barlow announced his parallel concordancer, ParaConc. With the help of two research assistants the newspaper texts were scanned or downloaded, edited, aligned, spell-checked, given TEI-conformant headers and loaded into ParaConc. We had our first parallel text files, and the hunt was on for more. We scoured the Web, looked for published translations, found texts on the European Corpus Initiative CD, and spent many boring hours manually editing and aligning large text files on small computers. Within a few months we had a small but diverse corpus that could be used by students of linguistics and translation, by colleagues for teaching, and for research in contrastive linguistics. We chose the name INTERSECT: (International Sample of English Contrastive Texts).

At the time of writing the French-English corpus contains about 1.5 million words of text in each language. The material includes:

  • Articles from Le Monde and their translation in Guardian Weekly
  • Magazine articles and official documents from Canada
  • Instructions for a variety of domestic appliances
  • Technical texts about telecommunications (from the ECI CD)
  • Texts from international organisations
  • Modern fiction
  • Academic textbooks

We have also added a German-English corpus has about 800,000 words in each language. The material includes:

  • Various company home pages: Hoechst, Siemens, BASF.
  • The constitutions of Germany, Switzerland and Austria
  • Various EU documents
  • Transcripts of speeches by the President of Germany
  • Short news items from the "German news" web site
  • Various United Nations documents.

Copyright continues to be tough problem for us: as a small research group we do not have the resources to obtain formal permission so that we can distribute the whole corpus to other researchers. We are, however, happy to explore co-operation with anyone who is working in this field.

 

References

  • Chuquet, H. & M. Paillard (1987)  Approche linguistique des problèmes de traduction: anglais <-> français.   Gap: Ophrys.
  • Chuquet, J., J. Bouscaren & L. Danon-Boileau (1987) Grammaire et textes anglais: guide pour l'analyse linguistique. Gap: Ophrys.
  • Culioli, A. (1990) Pour une linguistique de l'énonciation. Gap: Ophrys.
  • Guillemin-Flescher, J. (1991) Syntaxe comparée du français et de l'anglais. Gap: Ophrys.
  • Petton, A. (1996) La version anglaise expliquée. Paris: SEDES.
  • Van Hoof, H. (1989) Traduire l'anglais. Paris: Duculot.
  • Vinay, J.-P. & J. Darbelnet (1958) Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais.  Paris: Didier.

INTERSECT publications

  • Salkie, R. (1995) INTERSECT: a parallel corpus project at Brighton University. Computers & Texts, 9 (May 1995), pp. 4-5.
  • Salkie, R. (1995) Parallel Corpora, Translation Equivalence and Contrastive Linguistics. Paper read at the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing / Association for Computing in the Humanities 1995 Joint International Conference, Santa Barbara, July 1995.
  • Salkie, R. (1996) Modality in French and English: a corpus-based approach. Language Sciences 18 (1996), Nos. 1-2, pp. 381-392.
  • Dickens, A. and Salkie, R. (1996) Comparing Bilingual dictionaries with a parallel corpus. M. Gellerstam et al. (eds.) EURALEX '96 Proceedings (Göteborg University, 1996), pp. 551-559.
  • Salkie, R. (1996) English BUT and French MAIS: how do they differ. Paper read at "Languages in Contrast", a Symposium of the Nordic Network for Text-based Contrastive Studies, University of Aarhus, April 1996.
  • Salkie, R. (to appear) "Naturalness" and contrastive linguistics. To appear in J.Melia & B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (eds.) Proceedings of PALC 97. University of Lodz: Dept. of English.
  • Salkie, R. (to appear) Unlocking the power of the SMEMUC. To appear in S. Botley, A.McEnery and A. Wilson (eds.) Multilingual Corpora in Teaching and Research. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
  • Salkie, R. (to appear) Not mentioning the speaker in English and German. To appear in S. Johansson & S. Oksefjell (eds.) Computer corpora and crosslinguistic research. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Book notice

Bart Defrancq

Martínez Vázquez, M. (ed.)(1996) Gramática contrastiva inglés-español. Huelva: Universidad de Huelva. 350 p. ISBN 84-88751-44-3

The title of this book could be a bit misleading for those who understand the term grammar in its traditional sense. The Gramática contrastiva inglés-español is not a comprehensive description of morphological and syntactic properties of the languages involved - which is our understanding of a grammar -, but an eclectic collection of different approaches to the relationship between Spanish and English. It is important to note that I deliberately use the term relationship here, since not all the articles are concerned with language comparison. Those that are deal mostly with contrastive syntax, but the aim of the collection has clearly been to illustrate the relevance of language comparison for other linguistic disciplines, such as phonetics, pragmatics, translation, lexicography, rhetoric and history of language. The articles are not ordered thematically, so that texts that complement each other find themselves separated by several others.

In this short review I will discuss the set of complementary articles that are most relevant to someone who is working in the field of syntax and lexicography. This set of articles includes the contributions by M. Martínez Vázquez, Tamayo Borillo & Fernández Domínguez, R. Martínez Vázquez, González Romero, Rodríguez Arrizabalaga and Ruiz Yamuza. Their articles have in common that the starting point is a particular syntactic structure or set of related structures, which is submitted to various kinds of analyses.

A first set of articles deals with structural modifications of transitive predicates. The first article by M. Martínez Vázquez is on different types of English verbs that have all at one time been called ‘ergative' and shows that there are three different types involved according to the different relationship between transitive and intransitive structures of the same verb. These three types are ‘derived intransitivity' (e.g. wash in this material washes well), ‘alternating transitivity' (open in I opened the door/the door opened) and ‘derived transitivity' (walk in the I walked the dog). This classification also applies to Spanish verbs, but the lexical impact is different in both languages.

The first of Martínez Vázquez' types is studied in detail for both languages by González Romero (although she uses the more traditional name: middle constructions). A meticulous analysis of different properties allows her to discover that there is not just a morphologic difference between Spanish and English (presence vs. absence of the reflexive se): there are also differences with respect to modality and different restrictions on adverbial elements.

Ruiz Yamuza, on the other hand, compares the Spanish middle structures with the English get-passive in order to put into question some previously developed views on their similarity. She draws a detailed picture of semantico-pragmatic relations established by both structures and places them in a historical perspective, which explains their differences.

A second series of articles deals with complement structures. Rodríguez Arrizabalaga focuses on their syntactic and semantic properties and their lexical impact in both English and Spanish. She argues extensively in favour of her broad conception of the notion "complement", which includes adjectival constituents of intransitive predicates (e.g. The tears fell thick and fast upon the book). One of her main arguments, however, based on the dismantling of the differences between copular and intransitive predicates, is contradicted in another part of the article (p. 183). As far as the differences between English and Spanish are concerned, Rodríguez Arrizabalaga draws a very complete contrastive picture (too complete perhaps since some of the observations are not really relevant for the description of complement structures, cf. those on the omissibility of the subject in Spanish). Especially interesting are the descriptions of the complement's proform (lo vs. so) and the productivity of the "resultative" complement structures (he kicked the door open), a productivity which appears to be higher in English than in Spanish. Rodríguez Arrizabalaga illustrates the various strategies with which the translation problems which stem from this difference can be solved by a human translator. One of these strategies - the promotion of the second predicate (cf. he kicked the door open vs. abrió la puerta de una patada) - is extensively illustrated in the complementary article by Amores Carredano on machine translation of causative and resultative predicates. Amores Carredano insists on the necessity of introducing the causative and resultative predicates as complex predicates in the lexicon.

Of a totally different kind is Tamayo Borillo & Fernández Domínguez' two-part study of transitivity in Spanish and English. Their approach is metalinguistic and is aimed at determining which kind of structure the label "transitivity" applies to in both languages and whether or not it is a useful concept for the teaching of a foreign language grammar. Tamayo Borillo & Fernández Domínguez find that one of the fundamental aspects of the different treatment of transitivity is the status of the indirect object in the grammars of both languages. The role of the indirect object is less important in English grammars than in Spanish, since it is difficult in English to distinguish indirect and direct objects in contexts other than the ones in which they are both present. If there is only one object there seems to be no reason why the structure should not be analysed as transitive. In most Spanish grammars, on the other hand, structures with an indirect object are not categorised as transitive, since there are differences between direct and indirect objects. It appears, however, from a survey of different criteria that these differences are no objection to the analysis of indirect object structures in the framework of transitivity. Transitivity is then to be defined on a functional-semantic level, a position which receives support from the results of an inquiry involving English students of Spanish and Spanish students of English (part 2).
 
It is obvious that this brief review (I only mentioned about half of all articles) does not do justice do the collection as a whole, since its purpose is to show the different aspects of the relationship between English and Spanish with a view to teaching Spanish students English. That is why one might find that the focus is perhaps too little on Spanish and too much on English, if one adopts a strict contrastive perspective, but not if, as its name suggests, one considers that this Gramática is a tool rather than a theoretical framework.

 

 

[table of contents]

To the table of contents of other CONTRAGRAM issues.