Intra- and Inter-textual Syntactic Priming in Original and Translated English

Abstract

This article presents and discusses the results from a corpus-based study on the variation between English complement clauses with and without that in original versus translated English. The study is primarily aimed at disentangling the effects of, on the one hand, intratextual structural priming, i.e. the influence from a relevantly similar construction produced earlier in the (target) text, and, on the other hand, intertextual priming from the source text to the target text, i.e. the influence from a relatively similar source language construction encountered in the to be translated stretch of source text. The results indicate that whereas regular intratextual priming has the expected effect in the original English texts, this effect disappears in the translated texts, where intertextual priming turns out to be the most relevant mechanism.

Is linguistic decision-making constrained by the same cognitive factors in student and in professional translation?

“…priming from a preceding sentence in the Dutch translation to the next sentence in that translation, did not have any effect. This is in line with previous research by DeSutter et al (2021), who reach a similar conclusion in a corpus-based study on optional that in translated and non-translated English. It is not quite clear yet why intratextual priming does not play a role in translation, although it might be hypothesised that translators primarily switch back and forth between source text reading…”

“…As a corollary, the effect of subject length can also be indirectly related to this cognitive constraint: given the general preference in Dutch for placing shorter constituents before longer ones -the so-called 'Principle of End Weight' (Wasow, 2002;Haeseryn et al, 2019: 21 Structural priming is undoubtedly the best-known constraint, as it figures prominently in psycholinguistics (Bock, 1986) and usage-based linguistics (e.g. Gries, 2005;Szmrecsanyi, 2003;De Sutter, Colleman and Ghyselen, 2021. It is regarded as a residual activation effect, which increases the likelihood of a given morphosyntactic phenomenon (e.g. a specific word order configuration) that was activated recently (either in production or perception) being recycled (see Gries and Kootstra, 2017) 3 .…”