Language Processing in Discourse A Key to Felicitous Trans

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.2 Chafe 1987 distinguishes between active, semi-active and inactive information,which would allow us to classify role division as inactive, translation mechanismas semi-active.3 B�ring, for example, 1998, speaks of a partitive topic in a case like this, whichwe may expect to be quite frequent considering the processing advantage of focusspacing.4 It may be interesting to note that the clausal version meets the Principle of End-Weight, although in a wider sense than traditionally seen.Hawkins 1991 2considers it to be one of the basic principles of linearization, but this is ageneralization which has to be relativized by a wide range of restructuringpatterns, like the one illustrated above.4 In favour of primary relations1 Cf.Altmann 1989, or Tanenhaus 1988, for concise surveys of psycholinguisticresearch in the last decades.2 In fact, the difference has been measured by neurophysiologists (as A.Friederici1998: 180), who say that we may discover a grave syntactic error up to 200 msecfaster than a lexical-semantic error.Compare also Crocker 1996 for acomputational model on incremental processing.3 See Frazier 1988, 1999, or Frazier and Clifton 1996, on the garden path theory.4 We have already encountered the effect in topicalization and scrambling; ingeneral, this is a well-known phenomenon in focus theories; see for exampleStechow and Uhmann 1986.5 For the impact of morphological case on processing, compare for example Bader1998.6 See Doherty 1996, which reports on a two-year research project on this topic.7 Hawkins 1986 suggests that this is one of the many cases of a general differencebetween English and German, where the nature of the relation between syntaxand semantics is more homomorphous in German than in English.8 See Tanenhaus et al.1989.9 Halliday 1985 speaks of a grammatical metaphor in such cases.5 Structural weight1 For a systematic presentation of the various factors involved in the resolution ofanaphoric ambiguities, cf.for example Preuss et al.1994; for a general theory ofreferential movement in discourse Klein and Stutterheim 1991.2 Fabricius-Hansen 1999 formulates this as a principle constraining the intro-duction of new referents and new conditions in a text.3 A major example in the German forerunner to the Key; cf.also Doherty 1999c,for an English presentation.4 Defining relative clauses are likely to be relatively autonomous information units,which may promote contextual integration right away.Compare Marcus andHindle 1990, for the impact of sentence-internal boundaries on processing.5 Asher 1993 presents an elaborate theory on the various types of abstract objects182 Notesconstituted by anaphoric relations, which could provide the semantic-pragmaticframe for the following observations.For first applications to problems of trans-lation, cf.Fabricius-Hansen 1996, and Behrens 1998.6 Kade 1968 referred to the latter as a case of heterovalente �bersetzung, con-trasting it with equivalent translation.6 Grammaticalized clues1 For more detailed linguistic presentations of English clefts, see for example Prince1978; Declerck 1988; Collins 1991; Delin 1995.A comparative study of Englishclefts and their German translations is presented in Erdmann 1988, 1990.2 For a suggestion explaining Carroll s preference, see Doherty 2001a.3 Rooth 1999 says that it is an existential presupposition which is associated withclefts.4 A very productive pattern with dummy head nouns are sentences like:The main purpose behind the development of these techniques is to studyhow the activity of genes is controlled.which often correspond to simple sentences with marked topics in German:Die verschiedenen Verfahren der Gen�bertragung wurden vor allem f�r dieErforschung genetischer Steuerungsmechanismen entwickelt.(cf.Doherty 2001b)5 Cf.Doherty 1987, for a detailed semantic analysis of a handful of Germanparticles.6 For a comparative study of focusing particles, cf.K�nig, for example, 1991.7 Cf.for example, the corpus-linguistic findings in Johansson and Oksefjell 1998.8 Together with marked word order they belong to the linguistic clues whichpsycholinguists like Flores d Arcais 1988 expect to promote processing in alanguage-specific way.7 Shifting boundaries1 For a generative approach to the linguistics of punctuation, see Nunberg 1990.8 Relativizing optimality1 As Grice 1975 demonstrated in his seminal paper on logic and conversation.2 Some of the individual cases may, however, belong to conceptual differences of amore general nature, which can play a role in a wide variety of contexts.For animpressive collection of such culture-specific perspectives, as for example thedifferent concepts associated with left and right in German and English, compareSchmitt, for example, 1998.3 In the sense of the skopos theory by Rei� and Vermeer 1984.BibliographySourcesBernhard, T.(1989) Ausl�schung.Ein Zerfall, Berlin: Volk und Welt. (1995) Extinction, London: Penguin.Bredekamp, H.(1993) Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben, Berlin:Wagenbach. (1995) The Love of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, Princeton: MarkusWiener.Carroll, L.(1968) Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, New York:Penguin.Cooreman, A.(1988) Ergativity in Dyirbal , Linguistics, 26(5): 730f.Davies, D [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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