English tough constructions and their analogues in Russian

Tsikulina, Alina; Soroli, Eva

Type de document :

Autre communication scientifique (congrès sans actes - poster - séminaire...): Communication dans un congrès avec actes

DOI :

10.36505/ExLing-2023/14

Titre :

English tough constructions and their analogues in Russian

Auteur(s) :

Tsikulina, Alina [Auteur]
Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163 [STL]
Soroli, Eva [Auteur]

Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163 [STL]
Université de Lille - Faculté des Humanités [UL Humanités]

Titre de la manifestation scientifique :

In Botinis, A. (ed.) 14th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics (Exling-23) book of abstracts

Ville :

Athens

Pays :

France

Date de début de la manifestation scientifique :

2023-10-18

Éditeur :

Athens: ExLing Society Electronic edition

Date de publication :

2023-10-05

Mot(s)-clé(s) en anglais :

Tough constructions
Corpus data
Experimental data
English
Russian

Discipline(s) HAL :

Informatique [cs]/Informatique et langage [cs.CL]
Sciences cognitives
Sciences cognitives/Linguistique

Résumé en anglais : [en]

Evaluative constructions involving tough predicates (e.g., This book is easy to read) present atypical form-to-meaning mappings and vary across the languages of the world. In some languages (e.g., English) speakers use ...
Lire la suite >Evaluative constructions involving tough predicates (e.g., This book is easy to read) present atypical form-to-meaning mappings and vary across the languages of the world. In some languages (e.g., English) speakers use so-called toughconstructions (TCs) to evaluate an event/process – constructions in which thesyntactic subject NP of the matrix sentence is logically the missed object of the embedded non-finite verb. In other languages (e.g., Russian), such a construction is not possible but speakers express evaluation with a variety of functional analogues: e.g., use of passives – constructions with action predicates realized with a reflexive coupled with a manner adverb; use of deverbals – constructions involving a deverbal noun realized as a restrictive prepositional complement; use of predicatives – constructions involving a topicalized NP in the accusative case, a predicative adverbial and a dependent infinitive. Despite agrowing interest in TCs with respect to their syntactic-semantic unalignments and their high crosslinguistic variability, the inherent semantic and morphosyntactic properties of evaluative constructions, especially in languages such as Russian that do not offer tough movement per se, have been only superficially discussed. The aim of the present study is (a) to explore English TCs and their Russian equivalents; and (b) to identify the properties and the contexts of occurrence of the most frequent analogues coupling two types of data: corpus-based and experimental.The corpus investigation of the present study was based on the Opus-corpus subtitles database and allowed to compare English TCs as source patterns with Russian parallel translations as target alignments. The experimental study consisted in collecting written data from 25 L1 Russian speakers for comparison with the corpus-based findings. More specifically, the experimental data were gathered using a written description task. Participants had to type in a short sentence to describe a set of pictures depicting different scenes using three target words: an animate or an inaminate noun, a tough adverb and aninfinitive, counterbalancing their order of presentation. The translation corpus findings suggest that Russian offers mainly constructions involving an impersonal predicative, alternatively extraposed and compact constructions especially when the source TC involved high transitive verbs, with an inanimate NPs coupled with single-scope adjective, or with an animate NP coupled with a double-scope adjective. The experimental study confirmed the general preference of speakers for impersonal predicative constructions but also revealed other alternative constructions that do not appear in the corpus study (e.g., subject-reading, modal uses) which occurred especially when the target words were presented in tough-adverb+verb+NP order and when the scene involved an inanimate NP. Passive and Deverbal constructions, although described as frequent functional analogues for Russian in theoretical papers, only marginally occurred in the corpus and the experimental studies.This work reveals several analogue evaluative constructions (extraposed and compact alternatives in the corpus study, and modal and subject-readings in the experimental study), never discussed before for Russian. These findings only partially support previous theoretical classifications in the domain of TCs andsuggests that parallel corpus and experimental investigations are necessary for a fullest exploration of the grammar-thought relationship.Lire moins >

Langue :

Anglais

Comité de lecture :

Oui

Audience :

Internationale

Vulgarisation :

Non

Collections :

Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163

Source :

Harvested from HAL

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