On the usefulness of comparable and parallel corpora for contrastive linguistics. Testing the semantic stability hypothesis

Baets, Pauline De; Vandevoorde, Lore; Sutter, Gert De

doi:10.1515/9783110682588-004

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Previous research (see De Baets, Vandevoorde, and De Sutter 2020) reveals that the two most prototypical expressions of inchoativity in Dutch are beginnen 'to begin' and starten 'to start', and so we used these two verbs as the initial lexemes for the semantic mirroring technique. All the sentences containing beginnen or starten were extracted from the corpus and their respective translations in French and English were listed in the first T-image, containing commencer 'to begin', débuter 'to start', entamer 'to initiate', to start, and to begin.…”

Section: Lexeme Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the method was initially designed to capture word meaning (see De Baets, Vandevoorde, and De Sutter 2020), it can also be used to investigate which features are strongly associated with a certain verb of inchoativity and, consequently, which of the features have the largest impact on onomasiological choices. Table 2 presents all features used in this study.…”

Section: Behavioural Profilesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How do translators select among competing (near-)synonyms in translation?

Baets

Sutter

2022

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This article investigates how translators choose between multiple competing onomasiological variants to express (verbal) inchoativity in English-to-Dutch translations. Using a corpus-based multifactorial research design, we measure the impact of three well-known socio-cognitive mechanisms on the actual choice, namely the complexity principle, risk aversion, and cognate exposure. We apply the behavioural profile method, which allows us to operationalise these three explanatory mechanisms via ID-tags, and we then use conditional random forest modelling to determine the impact of each mechanism on the choice between four competing verbs of inchoativity. The results of our analyses show that the complexity principle plays a clear role in translated texts, as there is a significant preference for the active construction and for prototypical verbs in passive constructions. Genre-specific risk-averse behaviour as well as cognate avoidance were not observed.

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Section: Lexeme Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Behavioural Profilesmentioning

confidence: 99%