Bergljot Behrens

Progressive Attraction: On the Use and Grammaticalization of Progressive Aspect in Dutch, Norwegian, and German

This paper investigates the use of aspectual constructions in Dutch, Norwegian, and German, languages in which aspect marking that presents events explicitly as ongoing, is optional. Data were elicited under similar conditions with native speakers in the three countries. We show that while German speakers make insignificant use of aspectual constructions, usage patterns in Norwegian and Dutch present an interesting case of overlap, as well as differences, with respect to a set of factors that attract or constrain the use of different constructions. The results indicate that aspect marking is grammaticalizing in Dutch, but there are no clear signs of a similar process in Norwegian. *

Syntactic Variance and Priming Effects in Translation

The present work investigates the relationship between syntactic variation and priming in translation. It is based on the claim that languages share a common cognitive network of neural activity. When the source and target languages are solicited in a translation context, this shared network can lead to facilitation effects, so-called priming effects. We suggest that priming is a default setting in translation, a special case of language use where source and target languages are constantly co-activated. Such priming effects are not restricted to lexical elements, but do also occur on the syntactic level. We tested these hypotheses with translation data from the TPR database, more specifically for three language pairs (English-German, English-Danish, and English-Spanish). Our results show that response times are shorter when syntactic structures are shared. The model explains this through strongly co-activated network activity, which triggers a priming effect.

Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach

The present article provides evidence suggesting that general pragmatic accounts of orderliness in the temporal interpretation of VP coordination may be somewhat biased by the choice of typically script-based (con)sequential examples. Most of the discussion in the literature has been based on examples from a single language, mostly relying on the intuitions of the author(s) of the paper. On the basis of a cross-linguistic, empirical approach to language understanding, we have tested different language speakers’ preferred interpretation of the temporal relation holding in contextualized VP conjunctive sentences that are pragmatically not typically consequential or resultative. Under these conditions, our results show a preference for temporal overlap interpretations across languages. We also find that language-specific properties modify this general bias, thus supporting a competition-based account of relating form to meaning.

The Task of Structuring Information in Translation

The present chapter compares and evaluates the merits of three recent studies dealing with the cognitive processes of structuring information in translations. The studies differ in taking a syntactic, a functional and a conceptual approach respectively. Correlation between structuring operations in translation and cognitive effort is found to be higher when a conceptual relevance-theoretic approach is taken, yet the results are somewhat inconclusive due to weaknesses in the operationalization of the relevance theoretic concept of procedural information. The syntactic parsing approach would also be improved by a more fine grained analysis. Functional categories as well as reallocation measures are found to be relevant for a more precise understanding of the effort related to structuring operations in translation.

Referring Expressions in Speech Reports

When choosing among various referring expressions, speakers typically choose a form that reflects the audience’s mental representation of the intended referent. For instance, a speaker will most likely use a definite rather than indefinite description when introducing an entity that the addressee can uniquely identify. However, also considerations other than referent accessibility and the mental state of the addressee may affect the choice of nominal form. For instance, in a speech report such as Mary asked whether he had seen a dog, the choice of the expression a dog is influenced by the speaker’s intention to truthfully report on what was originally communicated as well as considerations about the representation of the referent in the mental model of the present addressee—and more than one nominal form may be valid. This paper reports on a pen-and-pencil experiment conducted to test how specific indefinites are reported on in direct and indirect speech in the four languages Czech, English, German, and Norwegian. The experiment supports the claim that indirect speech allows for a wider range of nominal forms than direct speech when the speaker reports on a speech event that originally contained a specific indefinite. Nevertheless, the study shows that the subjects prefer to use an indefinite description to report on a specific indefinite in indirect speech, even though also other forms are valid. This suggests that speaker’s effort, and not only hearer’s processing cost, may be crucial for the choice of nominal form. The comparison of the four languages reveals that general cognitive constraints related to reference assignment interact with language-specific conditions; examples are constraints on discourse type and considerations of processing economy following from the language’s lexical and morpho-syntactic inventory.

Pairing Form and Meaning in English and Norwegian: Conjoined VPs or Conjoined Clauses?

Conjoined VPs and conjoined clauses with co-referential subjects often seem interchangeable. Two comprehension studies, each conducted in both English and Norwegian, investigated which conjoined structure is preferred under given conditions. With adversative, or concessive, relations, conjoined clauses were preferred in both languages; with simple cause-result relations, conjoined VPs were preferred in both languages. These effects were more pronounced in Norwegian, where an overt or empty frame-setting adverbial must be taken to scope over both conjuncts of a conjoined VP but not over both conjuncts of a conjoined clause (whereas in English an overt or a covert frame-setting adverbial ambiguously scopes over either both clauses or just the first clause). A separate experiment investigated the preferred temporal interpretation for conjoined structures in English and Norwegian.

Connectives in contrast: A discourse semantic study of Elaboration based on corpus research

The present paper reports on part of a research project financed by the Research Council of Norway, in which we are concerned with contrastive linguistic issues that are central to theoretical as well as practical translation studies. Grounding our reflections on a corpus-based, contrastive study of English, German and Norwegian, we hope to shed new light on the relation between structural differences and language use in the three languages. Our study explores the use of connectives and their translational counterparts. Our goal is to come closer to an understanding of how propositional meanings are linked in text across languages, and what type of constraints regulate the use of connectives with similar meanings.