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Article published In:
Interpreting
Vol. 25:2 (2023) ► pp.239–273

Speaking in the first-person singular or plural

A multifactorial, speech corpus-based analysis of institutional interpreters

| University of Hong Kong
Conventionally, the professional interpreter speaks in the first-person singular. Research in corpus-based discourse analysis has reported shifts from this norm towards first-person plural becoming the most frequent pronoun shift in political institutional interpreting, possibly signalling interpreter ‘alignment with the institution’. Nonetheless, few studies have teased apart the simultaneous constraints of social, cognitive, and linguistic factors on institutional interpreters’ preference for the plural. The present research adopts the usage-based theory to consider the three types of explanations together. It extends recent multivariate methodologies based on this theory to analyse 2,438 first-person cases in parallel interpreting and comparable speech corpora. Following robust context analyses and cross-linguistic prosodic transcription, this study weighs the strengths of 33 associates regarding the three explanations through regression analyses. The results show that first-person shifts are better explained by chunking effects when interpreters process complex forms and referents in the source and target speeches, and when they process zero-subject source inputs. The institutional alignment explanation fails to account for the extensive grammaticalisation of plural constructions in the interpreted speech. When all the interactive and additive effects are considered together, institutional alignment or monofactorial paradigms have little explanatory power. This study concludes by highlighting the relevance of usage-based multifactorial designs to interpreting research.
Keywords: first-person interpreting, speech corpus, usage-based theory, grammaticalisation, MuPDAR(F)
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Explanations of institutional interpreters’ FPP plural preference
    • 2.1Social explanations
    • 2.2Cognitive processing
    • 2.3Linguistic diversity
  • 3.A usage-based approach
  • 4.Data and methods
    • 4.1Speech corpora
    • 4.2Behavioural Profile (BP) annotation
      • 4.2.1Random-effects terms
      • 4.2.2Social explanations-related variable
      • 4.2.3Cognitive and linguistic variables
      • 4.2.4Prosodic variables
    • 4.3Statistical analyses
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1Monofactorial models
    • 5.2Multifactorial models of source/recipient languages
      • 5.2.1Exploring FPP choices of OC speakers: ROC
      • 5.2.2Exploring FPP choices of the NE speaker: RNE
    • 5.3Comparisons between interpreting and source/recipient-language conventions
      • 5.3.1Applying ROC to predict interpreter FPP choices: ROC-IE
      • 5.3.2Applying RNE′ to predict interpreter FPP choices: RNE′-IE
    • 5.4Exploring institutional interpreters’ plural preference
      • 5.4.1Interpretational effects: Rplural
      • 5.4.2Contrastive effects: RIE
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/intp.00088.liu
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