Part of
When Data Challenges Theory: Unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structureEdited by Davide Garassino and Daniel Jacob
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 273] 2022
► pp. 271–304
Edited by Davide Garassino and Daniel Jacob
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 273] 2022
► pp. 271–304
Translation as a source of pragmatic interference?
An empirical investigation of French and Italian cleft sentences
In this paper, we pursue two main (interconnected) goals, relying on a comparable and parallel corpus of French and Italian cleft sentences. First, we assess the most typical formal and functional properties of clefts in these languages, while also considering variation due to the different types of data. Second, we verify the presence of interference in the translation of clefts from French into Italian. Translators’ choices mostly align with information-structural patterns found in original Italian texts, but word-for-word translation styles can increase the frequency of less-common cleft types in Italian, such as Broad Focus and Information Focus clefts. However, odd or infelicitous pragmatic effects arise only in very few cases.
Keywords: information structure, cleft sentences, focus, French and Italian, corpus-based pragmatics
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Cleft sentences in French and Italian
- 2.1Frequency
- 2.2Form and meaning
- 2.3Information structure
- Information focus
- Contrastive focus
- Contrastive topics
- Anaphoric CC clefts
- 2.4French and Italian in translation
- 3.Corpus presentation and research questions
- 3.1The corpus
- 3.2Research questions and hypotheses
- 4.Quantitative analysis
- 4.1Frequency
- 4.2Form of clefts
- 4.3Information structure
- 4.4Interim discussion
- 5.Translation of French clefts into Italian
- 5.1Translation of French clefts: A first glance
- 5.2Understanding the translation of cleft sentences: Conditional inference trees and random forests
- 5.3Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements -
Notes -
References
References
Belletti, Adriana
2015 The
focus map of clefts: Extraposition and
predication. In Beyond
Functional Sequence, The Cartography of Syntactic
Structures (Vol. 10), Ur Shlonsky (ed), 42–59. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Berretta, Monica
2002 “Quello
che voglio dire è che”: le scisse da strutture
topicalizzanti a connettivi
testuali. In La
parola al testo. Scritti per Bice Mortara
Garavelli, Gian Luigi Beccaria & Carla Marello (eds), 15–31. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.
Birner, Betty J. & Ward, Gregory
2009 Information
structure and syntactic
structure. Language and
Linguistics
Compass 3/4: 1167-1187.
Branigan, Holly P. & Pickering, Martin J.
2017 Structural
priming and the representation of
language. Behavioral and
Brain
Sciences 40: 1–73.
Brianti, Giovanna
2014 Cleft
sentences. A translation perspective on Italian and
French. In Frequency,
Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and
Germanic. Contrastive, Corpus-Based
Studies, Anna-Maria De Cesare (ed), 277–321. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Cartoni, Bruno & Meyer, Thomas
2012 Extracting
directional and comparable corpora from a multilingual
corpus for translation
studies. In Proceedings
of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation (LREC), Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk & Stelios Piperidis (eds), 2132–2137. Paris: European Language Resources Association.
Cettolo, Mauro, Girardi, Christian & Federico, Marcello
2012 WIT:
Web inventory of transcribed and translated
talks. In Proceedings
of the 16th EAMT
Conference, 261–268. Trento: Italy.
Clech-Darbon, Anne, Rebuschi, Georges & Rialland, Annie
1999 Are
there cleft sentences in
French? In The
Grammar of Focus, Georges Rebuschi & Laurice Tuller (eds), 83–118. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Cresti, Emanuela & Moneglia, Massimo
2005 C-ORAL-ROM.
Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance
Languages. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
De Cesare, Anna-Maria
2014 Cleft
Constructions in a contrastive perspective. Towards an
operational
taxonomy. In Frequency,
Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and
Germanic. Contrastive, Corpus-Based
Studies, Anna-Maria De Cesare (ed), 9–48. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
2016 Les
phrases clivées de l’italien en contact avec le français.
Une analyse basée sur les textes diffusés sur le portail
swissinfo.ch. In Romanische
Sprachen und ihre Didaktik, Christina Ossenkop & Georgia Veldre-Gerner (eds), 121–136. Stuttgart: Ibidem.
2017 Cleft
Constructions. In Manual
of Romance Morphosyntax and
Syntax [Manuals of Romance
Linguistics 17], Andreas Dufter & Elisabeth Stark (eds), 536–568. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
2020 È
con piacere che … / C’est avec plaisir que … On
Italian and French manner adverbial clefts expressing
emotional
states. In Pour
une perspective fonctionnelle des constructions syntaxiques
marquées [Special
issue], Anna-Maria De Cesare & Mervi Helkkula (eds). Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 120: 429–448.
De Cesare, Anna-Maria & Garassino, Davide
2015 On
the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An
empirical and cross-linguistic study of English
also/only-clefts and
Italian
anche/solo-clefts. Folia
Linguistica 49: 1–56.
De Cesare, Anna-Maria, Garassino, Davide, Agar Marco, Rocío, Albom, Ana & Cimmino, Doriana
2015 L’italiano
come lingua pluricentrica? Riflessioni sull’uso delle frasi
sintatticamente marcate nella scrittura giornalistica
online. Studi di grammatica
italiana 33: 295–363.
2016 Sintassi
marcata dell’italiano dell’uso medio in prospettiva
contrastiva con il francese, lo spagnolo, il tedesco e
l’inglese. Uno studio basato sulla scrittura dei quotidiani
online. Bern-Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Destruel, Emilie
2012 The
French c’est-cleft: An empirical study on
its meaning and
use. In Empirical
Issues in Syntax and Semantics 9: Selected Papers from the
Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (CSSP
2011), Christopher Piñón (ed), 95–112. [URL] (16 June 2021).
Destruel, Emilie & DeVeaugh-Geiss, Joseph
2018 On
the interpretation and processing of exhaustivity: Evidence
of variation in English and French
clefts. Journal of
Pragmatics 138: 1–16.
Destruel, Emilie & Velleman, Leah
2014 Refining
contrast: Empirical evidence from the English
it-cleft. In Empirical
Issues in Syntax and
Semantics 10, Christopher Piñón (ed), 197–214.
Dufter, Andreas
2009 Clefting
and discourse organization: Comparing Germanic and
Romance. In Focus
and Background in Romance
Languages, Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds), 83–121. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Eskola, Sari
2004 Untypical
frequencies in translated language: A corpus-based study on
a literary corpus of translated and non-translated
Finnish. In Translation
Universals. Do they
exist? [Benjamins Translation
Library 48], Anna Mauranen & Pekka Kujamäki (eds), 83–99. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Frison, Lorenza
(1988), Le
frasi
scisse. In Grande
grammatica italiana di
consultazione (Vol. 1), Lorenzo Renzi (ed), 194–225. Bologna: il Mulino.
Garassino, Davide
2014a Cleft
sentences. Italian-English in
contrast. In Frequency,
Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and
Germanic. Contrastive, Corpus-Based
Studies, Anna-Maria De Cesare (ed), 101–138. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
2014b Reverse
pseudo-clefts in Italian and English: A contrastive
analysis. In Tra
romanistica e germanistica: lingua, testo, cognizione e
cultura / Between Romance and Germanic: Language, Text,
Cognition and Culture, Iørn Korzen, Angela Ferrari & Anna-Maria De Cesare (eds), 55–74. Bern: Peter Lang.
2016 Using
cleft sentences in Italian and English. A multifactorial
analysis. In Current
Issues in Italian, Romance and Germanic Non-canonical Word
Orders. Syntax – Information Structure – Discourse
Organization, Anna-Maria De Cesare & Davide Garassino (eds), 181–204. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Garassino, Davide & Jacob, Daniel
This
volume. When data challenges
theory: The analysis of information structure and its
paradoxes. In When
Data Challenges Theory. Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence
in Information Structure, Davide Garassino & Daniel Jacob eds Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gast, Volker & Levshina, Natalia
2014 Motivating
w(h)-clefts in English and German: A
hypothesis-driven parallel corpus
study. In Frequency,
Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and
Germanic. Contrastive, Corpus-Based
Studies, Anna-Maria De Cesare (ed), 377–414. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Gries, Stefan Th. & Kootstra, Gerrit Jan
2017 Structural
priming within and across languages: A corpus-based
perspective. Bilingualism:
Language and
Cognition 20(2): 235–250.
Hasebe, Yoichiro
2015 Design
and implementation of an online corpus of presentation
transcripts of TED
talks. Procedia – Social and
Behavioral
Sciences 198: 174–182.
Hothorn, Torsten, Hornik, Kurt & Zeileis, Achim
2006 Unbiased
recursive partitioning: A conditional inference
framework. Journal of
Computational and Graphical
Statistics 15(3): 651–674.
Jacob, Daniel
2015 Anaphorische
Spaltsätze im Französischen: Grammatik – Text –
Rhetorik. In Informationsstrukturen
in Kontrast: Strukturen, Kompositionen und
Strategien, Séverine Adam, Daniel Jacob & Michael Schecker (eds), 101–122. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Jespersen, Otto
1937 Analytic
Syntax. London: Allen & Unwin.
Johansson, Stig
2007 Seeing
through Multilingual Corpora. On the Use of Corpora in
Contrastive
Studies. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Karssenberg, Lena
2018 Non-prototypical
Clefts in French. A Corpus Analysis of “il y
a”
Clefts. Berlin-New York: De Gruyer Mouton.
Karssenberg, Lena & Lahousse, Karen
2018 The
information structure of French il y a
clefts and c’est cleft: A corpus-based
analysis. Linguistics 56(3): 513–548.
Katz Bourns, Stacey
2014 Contrasting
c’est-clefts and
it-clefts in
discourse. In Perspectives
on Linguistic Structure and Context: Studies in Honor of
Knud Lambrecht, Stacey Katz Bourns, Lindsey L. Myers (eds), 199–222. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Koehn, Philipp
2005 Europarl:
A parallel corpus for statistical machine
translation. Proceedings of
Machine Translation
Summit 10: 79–86.
Krifka, Manfred & Musan, Renate
2012 Information
structure: Overview and linguistic
issues. In The
Expression of Information
Structure, Manfred Krifka & Renate Musan (eds), 1–44. Berlin-New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Lahousse, Karen & Lamiroy, Béatrice
2012 Word
order in French, Spanish and Italian: A grammaticalization
account. Folia
Linguistica 46(2): 387–415.
2015 “C’est
ainsi que”: Grammaticalisation ou lexicalisation ou les deux
à la fois? Journal of French
Language
Studies 27: 161–185.
Lambrecht, Knud
2001 A
framework for the analysis of cleft
constructions. Linguistics 39: 463–516.
Larrivée, Pierre
This
volume. The curious case of
the rare focus movement in
French. In When
Data Challenges Theory. Unexpected and Paradoxical Evidence
in Information Structure, Davide Garassino & Daniel Jacob eds Amsterdam-Philadelphia John Benjamins
Levshina, Natalia
2015 How
to do Linguistics with R. Data Exploration and Statistical
Analysis. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Maier, Robert M., Pickering, Martin J. & Hartsuiker, Robert J.
2017 Does
translation involve structural
priming? The Quarterly
Journal of Experimental
Psychology 70(8): 1575–1589.
McLaughlin, Mairi
2011 Syntactic
Borrowing in Contemporary French. A Linguistic Analysis of
News
Translation. Oxford: Legenda.
R Core
Team
2020 A
Language and Environment for Statistical
Computing. Wien: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL] (19 July 2021).
Riester, Arndt & Baumann, Stefan
2013 Focus
triggers and focus types from a corpus
perspective. Dialogue &
Discourse 4(2): 215–248.
Roggia, Carlo Enrico
2008 Frasi
scisse in italiano e francese orale: evidenze dal
C-ORAL-ROM. Cuadernos de
filología
italiana 15: 9–29.
2009 Le
frasi scisse in italiano. Struttura informativa e funzioni
discorsive. Genève: Slatkine.
Scappini, Sophie-Anne
2014 Construction
clivée. In Français
contemporain vernaculaire
(Fracov), Pierre Larrivée & Florence Lefeuvre (eds). [URL] (16 June 2021).
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Grafmiller, Jason, Heller, Benedikt & Röthlisberger, Melanie
2016 Around
the world in three alternations Modeling syntactic variation
in varieties of
English. English
World-Wide 37(2): 109–137.
Tagliamonte, Sali & Baayen, Harald
2012 Models,
forests, and trees of York English:
Was/were variation as a case study for
statistical
practice. Language Variation
and
Change 24(2): 135–178.
Vecchiato, Sara
2005 Interferenza
e strategie stilistiche nella traduzione dal francese
all’italiano. In L’italiano
delle traduzioni, Anna Cardinaletti & Giuliana Garzone (eds), 153–192. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Wartburg, Walther von
1940 La
posizione della lingua
italiana. Firenze: Sansoni.
Wienen, Ursula
2006 Zur
Übersetzbarkeit markierter Kohäsionsformen. Eine funktionale
Studie zum Kontinuum von Spaltadverbialen und
Spaltkonnektoren im Spanischen, Französischen und
Deutschen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Cited by
Cited by 5 other publications
Lahousse, Karen
2022. Is focus a root phenomenon?. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 148 ff. 
Larrivée, Pierre
2022. The curious case of the rare focus movement in French. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 184 ff.
Lombardi Vallauri, Edoardo
2022. Distinguishing psychological Given/New from linguistic Topic/Focus makes things clearer. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 40 ff.
Masia, Viviana
2022. Remarks on information structure marking asymmetries. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 58 ff.
Rosemeyer, Malte, Daniel Jacob & Lars Konieczny
2022. How alternatives are created. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 116 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 may 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.