Search results for "Linguistic typology"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Textual and pictorial components in the focus: paratext in translated graphic novels
2018
Summary In spite of manifold textual-pictorial make-up and remarkably varied meaning making function, paratext is one of the neglected research topics around graphic novels (graphic narrative in general). Even more so, this goes for translated graphic novels. Distinguishing between carrier media of paratext (front and back covers, blurbs) and forms of information (introduction, imprint, appendix), this study starts from describing most characteristic components of graphic novels’ paratext. Different from many articles on graphic narrative, this contribution is not only based on English, French and German, but also on Slavic (Czech, Polish, Serbian) source and target texts. All source texts …
Crossing the Frontiers of Linguistic Typology: Lexical Differences and Translation Patterns in English and Russian Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
2011
This article presents the results of the corpus-driven comparison between the English-original (1955) and Russian auto-translation (1967) of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The aim of the study, which was facilitated by the computer program WordSmith Tools 4.0, was to answer the question whether the differences attested between the English and Russian parallel texts arise from translation strategies [Nabokov was an ardent advocate of literal translation as the only strategy of truly transposing the original text (Beaujour 1995: 716; Grayson 1977: 13–15)], or whether they are due to typological differences between the English and Russian languages. This corpus-driven study consists of …
QuASIt: A Cognitive Inspired Approach to Question Answering for the Italian Language
2016
In this paper we present QuASIt, a Question Answering System for the Italian language, and the underlying cognitive architecture. The term cognitive is meant in the procedural semantics perspective, which states that the interpretation and/or production of a sentence requires the execution of some cognitive processes over both a perceptually grounded model of the world, and a linguistic knowledge acquired previously. We attempted to model these cognitive processes with the aim to make an artificial agent able both to understand and produce natural language sentences. The agent runs these processes on its inner domain representation using the linguistic knowledge also. In this sense, QuASIt …
Performance in Knowledge Assessment Tests from the Perspective of Linguistic Typology
2019
An important part of cross-linguistic variation manifests itself in the grammatical categories which are available in the grammar of a language, their semantic fine-grainedness and the obligatoriness of their use. The present paper will focus on three domains of grammar: (1) information structure and topicality, (2) converbs and clause combining and (3) modality and evidentiality. These domains are known to be prominent in Japanese and Korean grammar while they are clearly less relevant in English. The paper will first give a detailed account of these structures with examples from the US Test of Understanding in College Economics (TUCE). As will become quite clear, the versions of the test …
Knowledge Representation and Cognitive Skills in Problem Solving
2017
This paper offers a programmatic view on the study of cross-linguistic variation and its effects on human cognitive skills. Based on Linguistic Typology and its methodology to account for cross-linguistic differences (section 2), it will show how the presence or absence of certain grammatical categories enhances or inhibits specific skills in the domain of quantification (section 3). In its main part (section 4), it will show how to describe structural differences between the source and the target language in translation and how to find out if these differences affect the performance of students in knowledge assessment tests. For that purpose, it will compare the English and the Japanese ve…