The topic of this work is nominal coreference in English and German. Its focus is on coreference relations that establish textual coherence and continuity above the local level of the clause. The book shows how linguistic options for creating coreference in English and German can be interpreted against the background of their motivating factors. It discusses mental text processing, German-English systemic contrasts and register peculiarities as possible sources for variation on different linguistic levels. Hermeneutic and example-based observations are complemented by a corpus-linguistic analysis of English and German political essays and German translations from the English originals. The study finally highlights linguistic and functional correlations of coreference instantiations in English and German texts, additionally shedding light on coreference strategies employed in translations. It thus yields an incentive for future research as well as providing a wealth of insights for language and translation teaching.

In contrastive linguistics of English and German, there is a tradition of accounting for contrasts with respect to grammar and, to a lesser extent, for lexis and phonetics. Moving on to discourse and text, there is a sizeable body of literature on cohesive patterns in English and German respectively - but very little in terms of a comparison. The latter, though, is of particular interest for language learners, translators and, of course, linguists and researchers in language technology. This book attempts to close this gap, based on a number of years of corpus-based study into variation and cohesion in the two languages. While there is an overall focus on language contrasts, it also investigates variation between different registers language-internally, and between written and spoken mode in particular. For each of the five major types of cohesion (co-reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctive relations and lexical cohesion), overviews are given of contrasts in the system and of contrastive frequencies in texts. Results and methods presented in this book are thus relevant for language teaching, translation, language technology and corpus-based work on English and German generally.

‘Coreference’ presents specificities of reference, anaphora and coreference in Polish, establish identity-of-reference annotation model and present methodology used to create the corpus of Polish general nominal coreference. Various resolution approaches are presented, followed by their evaluation. By discussing the subsequent steps of building a coreference-related component of the natural language processing toolset and offering deeper explanation of the decisions taken, this volume might also serve as a reference book on state-of the art methods of carrying out coreference projects for new languages and a tutorial for NLP practitioners. Apart from serving as a description of the fi rst complete approach to annotation and resolution of direct nominal coreference for Polish, this book is a useful starting point for further work on other types of anaphora/coreference, semantic annotation, cognitive linguistics (related to the topic of near-identity, discussed in the book) etc. With extended tutorial-like sections on important subtopics, such as evaluation metrics for coreference resolution, it can prove useful to both researchers and practitioners interested in semantic description of Balto-Slavic languages and their processing, engineers developing language resources, tools and linguistic processing chains, as well as computational linguists in general.

This collection features eight interviews with seven senior scholars, whose seminal works involve the application of Systemic Functional Linguistica (SFL) to translation studies have advanced Systemic Functional Translation Studies (SFTS) as a research agenda in its own right, with critical reflections and insights into future directions. The book introduces SFTS as a research field, tracing its development and situating the contributions of the scholars interviewed within this tradition. An international group of researchers working across a diverse range of topics within SFTS are interviewed, including Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, Erich Steiner, J.R. Martin, Juliane House, Jeremy Munday, Adriana Pagano and Akila Sellami-Baklouti. Taken together, the collection offers a comprehensive account of theoretical and methodological developments in SFTS, with critical overviews of these scholars’ body of work within the research area and reflections on the emerging research that pushes SFTS scholarship into new frontiers. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars in translation studies and Systemic Functional Linguistics, as well as those interested in innovations in linguistic theory.

The book specifies a corpus architecture, including annotation and querying techniques, and its implementation. The corpus architecture is developed for empirical studies of translations, and beyond those for the study of texts which are inter-lingually comparable, particularly texts of similar registers. The compiled corpus, CroCo, is a resource for research and is, with some copyright restrictions, accessible to other research projects. Most of the research was undertaken as part of a DFG-Project into linguistic properties of translations. Fundamentally, this research project was a corpus-based investigation into the language pair English-German. The long-term goal is a contribution to the study of translation as a contact variety, and beyond this to language comparison and language contact more generally with the language pair English - German as our object languages. This goal implies a thorough interest in possible specific properties of translations, and beyond this in an empirical translation theory. The methodology developed is not restricted to the traditional exclusively system-based comparison of earlier days, where real-text excerpts or constructed examples are used as mere illustrations of assumptions and claims, but instead implements an empirical research strategy involving structured data (the sub-corpora and their relationships to each other, annotated and aligned on various theoretically motivated levels of representation), the formation of hypotheses and their operationalizations, statistics on the data, critical examinations of their significance, and interpretation against the background of system-based comparisons and other independent sources of explanation for the phenomena observed. Further applications of the resource developed in computational linguistics are outlined and evaluated.

With the rapid growth of corpus-based translations studies (CBTS) over recent years, this book offers a timely overview of the field today. It features cutting-edge studies from leading experts in the area, focused on both professional and student translations, and covers the latest theoretical developments such as the constrained communication framework, with a strong focus on methodology, particularly mixed-method approaches, multivariate research designs and translation error annotation. The volume highlights the emerging interdisciplinary bridges between CBTS and other areas in linguistics and demonstrates the applications of these theories and methods to translator training. It also offers a forward-looking perspective by presenting some of the challenges CBTS currently faces and possible pathways for future research. Thanks to its combined theoretical, methodological and applied perspective and innovative approaches, Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Translation Studies will appeal to both seasoned specialists and newcomers to the field.

This volume provides an innovative approach to the referential process thanks to its focus on the relationship between conventions and discourse pragmatics. It brings together a cross-section of current research on referential conventions and pragmatic strategies, in a number of different fields (formal and theoretical linguistics, semantics, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, interactional linguistics, natural language processing), in a variety of verbal and non-verbal languages (English, German, different varieties of French, Indonesian, French Belgian Sign Language) and in a diversity of contexts (the coining of names, language acquisition, second language learning, and various genres such as news articles, narratives, satire or game playing). The volume is meant as a series of thought-provoking studies which place speakers and addressees at the core of the referential act, thus providing evidence on how they negotiate and adjust, depending on the context.

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded).

The present volume is devoted to the study of language use in translated texts as a function of various linguistic, contextual and cognitive factors. It contributes to the recent trend in empirical translation studies towards more methodological sophistication, including mixed methodology designs and multivariate statistical analyses, ultimately leading to a more accurate understanding of language use in translations.

The contributions to this volume investigate relations of cohesion and coherence as well as instantiations of discourse phenomena and their interaction with information structure in multilingual contexts. Some contributions concentrate on procedures to analyze cohesion and coherence from a corpus-linguistic perspective. Others have a particular focus on textual cohesion in parallel corpora that include both originals and translated texts. Additionally, the papers in the volume discuss the nature of cohesion and coherence with implications for human and machine translation. The contributors are experts on discourse phenomena and textuality who address these issues from an empirical perspective. The chapters in this volume are grounded in the latest research making this book useful to both experts of discourse studies and computational linguistics, as well as advanced students with an interest in these disciplines. We hope that this volume will serve as a catalyst to other researchers and will facilitate further advances in the development of cost-effective annotation procedures, the application of statistical techniques for the analysis of linguistic phenomena and the elaboration of new methods for data interpretation in multilingual corpus linguistics and machine translation.