The third person plural impersonal in Swedish A typological account S ł o w a k l u c z e : konstrukcje nieosobowe; zaimek osobowy; szwedzki; nieosobowe odczytania zaimka; rozmyta referencja; agent K e y w o r d s : impersonals; 3 pl personal pronoun; Swedish; impersonal readings; vague reference; agent defocusing 1 I am very grateful to the anonymous referees for the careful reading of the paper and for their comments which helped me to improve the paper.
The Norwegian lexical item akkurat and the Polish akurat: a cognitive semantic analysisThe aim of the article is to demonstrate to what extent the Norwegian akkurat and the Polish akurat show similarities and differences in their conceptual content (meaning). Adopting the perspective of cognitive semantics (CS), as described in Langacker (1987) and Lakoff (1987), I shall try to show that the meanings ascribed to these etymologically and formally related words constitute complex networks of senses, rooted in a prototypical centre in each of the languages under discussion. In addition to this, the findings will be interpreted with reference to the process of pragmaticalization (a language unit’s development of increasing pragmatic functions). Within this theoretical framework I shall demonstrate that subjectification/intersubjectification and pejoration/melioration motivate the main semantic difference between akkurat and akurat. The analysis is based on Norwegian and Polish monolingual corpus data.
The paper examines the way declarative sentences are introduced in a text in two closely related languages – Norwegian and German. It aims to reveal to what extent the languages under investigation are similar when it comes to meaning construal in this respect and which mechanisms may be classified as language specific. For the purposes of the study, the Norwegian item DET, which possesses multiple functions in sentence openings, has been chosen as a point of departure in a detailed contrastive analysis based on translation data taken from a parallel corpus. The research shows clear similarities in word order between Norwegian and German in sentence openings. However, in German, the notional subject, complex adverbials and even objects, are clearly preferred as thematic and most prominent parts of an event, while they typically appear in the sentence-final position in Norwegian. These differences in meaning construal are explained on the basis of different perspectives adopted in German and Norwegian – a narrow point of view in the former and a distant one in the latter. Niniejszy artykuł analizuje sposoby rozpoczynania zdań oznajmujących w tekście w dwóch blisko spokrewnionych językach - norweskim i niemieckim. Ma na celu pokazanie w jakim zakresie badane języki są podobne pod tym względem, a jakie mechanizmy można zaklasyfikować jako specyficzne dla danego języka. W przeprowadzonym badaniu za podstawę szczegółowej analizy kontrastywnej, opartej na danych tłumaczeniowych, wybrano zdania zawierające w swojej inicjalnej części norweską jednostkę leksykalną DET, spełniającą wiele funkcji w tym języku. Analiza została przeprowadzona w oparciu o materiał językowy zaczerpnięty z wielojęzycznego korpusu równoległego. Badanie pokazuje wyraźne podobieństwa zachodzące między j. norweskim a j. niemieckim na poziomie inicjalnego szyku zdania w wypowiedzeniach w tekście. Jednak w języku niemieckim podmiot pojęciowy, złożone okoliczniki, a nawet dopełnienia są wyraźnie preferowane jako tematyczne i najbardziej wyraziste elementy zdarzenia, o którym mowa. W języku norweskim zwykle pojawiają się one natomiast w części finalnej zdania. Zaobserwowane różnice są wyjaśniane w oparciu o różne perspektywy preferowane w omawianych językach na płaszczyźnie konstruowania treści w tekście – postrzeganie zdarzenia z bliska w j. niemieckim i z oddalenia w j. norweskim. Wyrazy klucze: funkcjonalna perspektywa zdania, tłumaczenie dosłowne, analiza kontrastywna
This paper looks into the issue of Swedish-Polish translationese as a manifestation of the Swedish centre impact on languages in the world via translation. The term “translationese” is used to describe a specific language created in translated texts, among other things in Swedish-to-Polish translation. Such a language may be postulated to influence contemporary Polish in some domains due to abundant translations of Swedish literature in Poland in recent years. What features can be then ascribed to the Swedish-Polish translationese, not only from a lexical but from a grammatical point of view as well? The paper addresses this question thorough an analysis of a Swedish literary text and its 33 Polish non-professional translations, which are assumed to maximize the tension between Swedish and Polish in translation underlying the development of translationese. However, the intention is not to characterize such a language as a whole, but to test some hypotheses in its delimitation. The propounded hypothesis is that the occurrence of a postulated feature in the majority of the collected translations may be seen as an indicator of this feature’s existence in the Swedish- Polish translationese as such. The following features are identified: frequent use of short sentences, possessive pronouns in an NP, underspecified expressions and repetitions of lexical items, as well as desolation of fixed phrases. The presented research may be an impute to a broader corpus-based contrastive study.
This article draws on data from a parallel corpus (the Oslo Multilingual Corpus) to explore differences in how the cognate Norwegian and German adverbs her/hier 'here' (seemingly highly similar in meaning) are used as deictic space builders in discourse. The aim of the presented study is to propose some more general cognitive mechanisms that may underlie such differences, in the languages that are closely related. The linguistic material is considered within the framework of cognitive grammar and is linked to recent knowledge on bilingual cognition as represented in translation. By carefully examining both the sources and translations of these adverbs in the corpus of translations, we identify different patterns of construal in the languages compared. The main difference found in setting up the deictic space pertains to the construction of the coordinate system preferred in Norwegian and German-a more egocentric one in the former, and one more subjective and focused on the object of conceptualization in the latter. Thus, close scrutiny of how the two cognates behave in translation helps us to confirm that differences in imagery in two languages may be based on different preferred vantage points, resulting in some clear conceptualization patterns on a lower level, and that imagery is subject to choice of particular cultures. Additionally, it is demonstrated that Norwegian seems less space-oriented than German, which to a greater extent prefers detailed spatial indication within discourse, and that the German hier may be less proximal than the proximal her.
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