Changing conventions in German causal clause complexes
A diachronic corpus study of translated and non-translated business articles
Mario Bisiada | University of Manchester (United Kingdom)
This paper contributes to the field of diachronic corpus studies of linguistic change through language contact in translation by replicating Becher’s (2011) study which found a trend from hypotaxis to parataxis in concessive clause complexes of German popular scientific articles, and examining whether a comparable trend can be found in causal clause complexes in another genre. The study draws on a one-million-word translation corpus of English business articles and their German translations, as well as on a comparable corpus of German non-translations. The corpora consist of texts published in two time periods, 1982–3 and 2008. German translations of English causal conjunctions are compared for both time periods to determine diachronic changes in causal clause complexes. The comparable corpus is then analysed to find out whether those changes also happened in non-translated language. While a trend from hypotaxis to parataxis in both corpora can be observed, hypotaxis remains more frequent than parataxis. The study also detects a shift in preference for the causal conjunctions weil, denn and da, which partly causes the decrease in hypotaxis.
2016. Verb-second word order after German <i>weil</i> ‘because’: Psycholinguistic theory from corpus-linguistic data. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 1:1
2015. House, Juliane, ed. (2014): Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 290 p.. Meta: Journal des traducteurs 60:3 ► pp. 640 ff.
Bisiada, Mario
2016. Structural effects of English–German language contact in translation on concessive constructions in business articles. Text & Talk 36:2
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 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.