Danish equivalents to English ing clauses
Keywords:
grammar, semantics, English, Danish, contrastive linguisticsAbstract
The present article is about English adverbial present participle clauses (‑ing clauses) and their relation to Danish. The purpose of the investigation is to describe how the information expressed in ‑ing clauses is expressed in Danish, in which this grammatical construction normally does not occur. The data consists of English ‑ing clauses and translational equivalents found in the parallel corpus European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus. It is discovered that equivalent English and Danish expressions typically have the same semantic role despite being structured differently, but that the semantic role is usually more explicit in Danish. This is because the frequent absence of explicit subordinator in ‑ing clauses makes their semantic role understandable only through context whereas the different structures of the Danish equivalents often include an explicit indicator of the semantic role.
References
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Peters, P. (2013). adverbial. In The Cambridge Dictionary of English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (4th imp.). New York: Longman.
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Schjoldager, A. (2008). Understanding Translation (3rd imp.). Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel.
Stefanowitsch, A., and Gries, S. T. (2005). Covarying collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 1(1), 1–43.
Talmy, L. (2000). Figure and Ground in Language. In Toward a Cognitive Semantics (Vol. 1, pp. 311–344). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Tuggy, D. (2006). Schematic network: Ambiguity, polysemy, and vagueness. In D. Geeraerts (Ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings (pp. 167–184). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Becker-Christensen, C., and Widell, P. (1995). Politikens nudansk grammatik. Copenhagen: Politiken.
Bouissac, P. (1998). Iconicity. In Encyclopedia of Semiotics (pp. 294–297). New York: Oxford University Press.
Brown, P. F., Lai, J. C., and Mercer, R. L. (1991). Aligning Sentences in Parallel Corpora. Proceedings, 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 169–176.
Christensen, R. Z., and Christensen, L. (2016). Dansk grammatik (3rd ed., 2nd imp.). Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag.
Croft, W. (2001). A Radical Approach to Syntactic Relations. In Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective (pp. 203–240). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deane, P. D. (1988). Polysemy and cognition. Lingua, 75(4), 325–361.
Dipper, S., Rieger, C., Seiss, M., and Zinsmeister, H. (2011). Abstract Anaphors in German and English. In I. Hendrickx, S. L. Devi, A. Branco, & R. Mitkov (Eds.), Anaphora Processing and Applications: 8th Discourse Anaphora, and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium, DAARC 2011, Faro, Portugal, October 6-7, 2011, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 96–107). Berlin: Springer.
Egan, T. (2008). Non-finite Complementation: A usage-based study of infinitive and -ing clauses in English. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Fischer, O., and Nänny, M. (1999). Introduction: Iconicity as a Creative Force in Language Use. In M. Nänny & O. Fischer (Eds.), Form Miming Meaning (pp. xv–xxxvi). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Gale, W. A., and Church, K. W. (1993). A Program for Aligning Sentences in Bilingual Corpora. Computational Linguistics, 19(1), 75–102.
Gries, S. T. (2014). Coll.analysis 3.5: A script for R to compute perform collostructional analyses (Version 3.5).
Hansen, E., and Heltoft, L. (2011). Grammatik over det Danske Sprog (Vols 1–3). Copenhagen and Odense: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab and Syddansk Universitetsforlag.
Hasselgård, H. (2010). Adjunct Adverbials in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Havu, E. (2014). French and Finnish converbal constructions and their translation from French into Finnish. In L. Visapää, J. Kalliokoski, & H. Sorva (Eds.), Contexts of Subordination: Cognitive, typological and discourse perspectives (pp. 245–268). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Jakobson, R. (1965). Quest for the Essence of Language. Diogenes, 13(51), 21–37.
Jensen, P. A. (1985). Principper for grammatisk analyse (3rd imp.). Copenhagen: Handelshøjskolens Forlag.
Kilgariff, A., Baisa, V., Bušta, J., Jakubíček, M., Kovář, V., Michelfeit, J., … Suchomel, J. (2014). The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On. Lexicography, 1, 7–36.
Kirk, J. (1996). English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik. Edited by Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg. London: Longman, 1991. Journal of English Linguistics, 24(3), 250–258.
Koehn, P. (2005). Europarl: A Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation. In 10th MT Summit (pp. 79–86).
Koehn, P. (2011). European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus 1996-2011 [website]. Retrieved 18 September 2017, from http://www.statmt.org/europarl/
König, E. (1995). The meaning of converb constructions. In M. Haspelmath & E. König (Eds.), Converbs in Cross-Linguistic Perspective: Structure and Meaning of Adverbial Verb Forms – Adverbial Participles, Gerunds – (pp. 57–96). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kortmann, B. (1995). Adverb participial clauses in English. In M. Haspelmath & E. König (Eds.), Converbs in Cross-Linguistic Perspective: Structure and Meaning of Adverbial Verb Forms – Adverbial Participles, Gerunds – (pp. 189–238). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lauridsen, K. (1996). Text corpora in contrastive linguistics: Which type of corpus for which type of analysis? In K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg, & M. Johansson (Eds.), Languages in Contrast. Papers from a symposium on text-based cross-linguistic studies, Lund, 4–5 March 1994 (pp. 63–71). Lund: Lund University Press.
Mauranen, A. (1999). Will ‘translationese’ ruin a contrastive study? Languages in Contrast, 2(2), 161–185.
McEnery, T., and Xiao, Z. (2007). Parallel and Comparable Corpora: The State of Play. In Y. Kawaguchi, T. Takagaki, and N. Tomimori (Eds.), Corpus-Based Perspectives in Linguistics (pp. 131–145). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Newmark, P. (1988). The Other Translation Procedures. In A Textbook of Translation (pp. 81–93). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Peters, P. (2013). adverbial. In The Cambridge Dictionary of English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., and Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (4th imp.). New York: Longman.
R Core Team. (2017). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 3.4.2). Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Sarda, L., Carter-Thomas, S., Fagard, B., and Charolles, M. (2014). Adverbials: from predicative to discourse functions. In Adverbials in Use: From Predicative to Discourse Functions (pp. 13–39). Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain.
Schjoldager, A. (2008). Understanding Translation (3rd imp.). Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel.
Stefanowitsch, A., and Gries, S. T. (2005). Covarying collexemes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 1(1), 1–43.
Talmy, L. (2000). Figure and Ground in Language. In Toward a Cognitive Semantics (Vol. 1, pp. 311–344). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Tuggy, D. (2006). Schematic network: Ambiguity, polysemy, and vagueness. In D. Geeraerts (Ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings (pp. 167–184). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Published
2019-02-19
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van Leeuwen, N. (2019). Danish equivalents to English ing clauses. Journal of Language Works - Sprogvidenskabeligt Studentertidsskrift, 3(2), 49–74. Retrieved from https://tidsskrift.dk/lwo/article/view/112504
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