The use of translations in linguistic argumentation

Abstract

Despite obvious interference risks, it has been argued in former studies that translations constitute a useful tool for investigating lexical phenomena. By means of a corpus study on prepositional clauses introduced byparain Spanish and Portuguese, the present paper shows that translations can also be a valuable methodological tool for the study of grammatical phenomena in a given language. The results from both a translation and a comparable Portuguese/Spanish and Spanish/Portuguese corpus are shown to converge and reveal that the inflection of the Portuguese infinitive is used to strengthen thematic continuity, whereas an overt subject appears in cases of inaccessibility within the sentence margins. The present study therefore deepens former accounts on the nature of the Portuguese inflected infinitive and the Spanish and Portuguesepara-clauses in general by comparing translations in both languages.

Marcadores del discurso derivados de los verbos de percepción

“…Por eso, más recientemente, varios estudiosos (entre otros Viberg 1999Viberg , 2002Viberg , 2005Altenberg & Granger 2002;Gilquin 2008;McEnery & Xiao 2008;Mortier & Degand 2009;Vanderschueren 2010) han abogado a favor de la combinación de un corpus paralelo y un corpus comparable, 9 considerando estos como fuentes complementarias para la investigación contrastiva. Es más, en relación a nuestro objeto de estudio, o sea las partículas pragmáticas, Altenberg & Granger (2002, p. 25) señalan explícitamente que "the meaning of these particles is difficult to pinpoint […] they also tend to have various interactive or interpersonal functions without any direct lexical counterpart in other languages.…”

On the crosslinguistic equivalence of sentir(e) in Romance languages: A contrastive study in semantics

“…This is why more recently, linguists (e.g. Viberg 1999Viberg , 2002Viberg , 2005Altenberg and Granger 2002;Gilquin 2008;McEnery and Xiao 2008;Mortier and Degand 2009;Vanderschueren 2010) have argued in favor of a combination of parallel and comparable corpora, where these two are considered as complementary sources of cross-linguistic data.…”