A Methodological Proposal for the Study of Semantic Functions across Languages

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>After a brief revision of the major currents of thought and grammatical models in the history of CS (Contrastive Studies), a method of analysis suitable for corpus-based descriptive studies across languages is presented and discussed in this paper. As an alternative to translation corpora, the use of comparable corpora is advocated and put into practice in a large-scale research on a particular semantic function, quantification, and its expression in two languages, English and Spanish. The different phases of the process are explained and a summary of achievements is provided. The ultimate purpose of the paper is to contribute to the strengthening of the discipline by offering new results about one pair of languages and by suggesting a methodology that can be broadly applied to different semantic fields and pairs of languages.</jats:p>

Towards a Multimodal Pragmatic Analysis of Film Discourse in Audiovisual Translation

“…They can be extended to other AVT modes such as print advertising, TV commercials, cartoons and soap operas. They are based on the propositions made by Toury (1995) and Labrador de la Cruz (2004), and are formalised as follows: 1) collecting and selecting the basic data (speech acts) from the films; 2) delimiting the working corpus to make a representative sample of the data; 3) observing the collected data to check the level of correspondence between the ST and the TT data as well as to identify their types and frequencies; 4) juxtaposing the ST -TT data to categorise them in form-function relationships; 5) analysing the ST -TT data systematically to discover the similarities/differences as well as the factors/strategies used in subtitling; 6) locating the ST -TT data in their context of culture and evaluating the research findings; 7) drawing implications and/or generalisations for theory building in AVT.…”