A contrastive analysis of reporting clauses in comparable and translated academic texts in English and Italian

Abstract

This article investigates the use of finite reporting clauses with that-clause complementation (e.g. I will suggest that…) as devices for the expression of stance in academic texts (Hyland and Tse 2005;Charles 2006). These constructions are compared to their functional equivalents in Italian, i.e. reporting clauses with che ('that') complementiser. The comparison is carried out using a corpus-based approach, involving the analysis of a parallel corpus of Political Science papers in English and their translations into Italian, as well as a comparable corpus of articles originally written in Italian within the same discipline. Thanks to their ability to convey evaluative meanings, reporting clauses are analysed as structures that may provide insights into the epistemological negotiations taking place in the encounter of different research traditions through the practice of translation.

Quantitative methods for corpus-based contrastive linguistics

“…Indeed, a closer look at the recent bibliography in contrastive corpus-based semantics shows that, with the notable exception of studies such as Levshina (2016), many analyses are based exclusively on frequency counts of translation equivalents (among others Viberg 1999Viberg , 2002Viberg , 2005Altenberg 2002;Schmied 2008). Other studies make use of comparable corpora instead of translations or a combination of both, but are again largely based on mere (relative) frequencies (among others Enghels and Jansegers 2013;Comer and Enghels 2016;Rozumko 2016;Lansari 2017;Molino 2017).…”