Search results for "Natural language"

Why Translation Is Difficult

2017

The paper develops a definition of translation literality that is based on the syntactic and semantic similarity of the source and the target texts. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that absolute literal translations are easy to produce. Based on a multilingual corpus of alternative translations we investigate the effects of cross-lingual syntactic and semantic distance on translation production times and find that non-literality makes from-scratch translation and post-editing difficult. We show that statistical machine translation systems encounter even more difficulties with non-literality.

Collocation Dictionaries: A Comparative Analysis

2014

The importance of phraseological information in lexicographic resources is experiencing an exponential growth. This is evident in the publication in recent years of a wide variety of combinatorial or collocation dictionaries. This paper describes and compares the main monolingual collocation dictionaries for English and Spanish in regards to the following: (i) types of collocation encoded; (ii) kinds of collocational information offered; (iii) place for collocations in the micro or macrostructure of the dictionary. The objective of this analysis is to study the usefulness of these resources for translators.

Getting rid of the Chi-square and Log-likelihood tests for analysing vocabulary differences between corpora

2018

Log-likelihood and Chi-square tests are probably the most popular statistical tests used in corpus linguistics, especially when the research is aiming to describe the lexical variations between corpora. However, because this specific use of the Chi-square test is not valid, it produces far too many significant results. This paper explains the source of the problem (i.e., the non-independence of the observations), the reasons for which the usual solutions are not acceptable and which kinds of statistical test should be used instead. A corpus analysis conducted on the lexical differences between American and British English is then reported, in order to demonstrate the problem and to confirm …

Age-related effects on lexical, but not syntactic, processes during sentence production

2021

ABSTRACT We investigated the effect of healthy ageing on the lexical and syntactic processes involved in sentence production. Young and older adults completed a semantic interference sentence production task: we manipulated whether the target picture and distractor word were semantically related or unrelated and whether they fell within the same phrase (“the watch and the clock/hippo move apart”) or different phrases (“the watch moves above the clock/hippo”). Both age groups were slower to initiate sentences containing a larger, compared to a smaller, initial phrase, indicating a similar phrasal scope of advanced planning. However, older adults displayed significantly larger semantic interf…

Language as Dialogue: From Rules to Principles of Probability

2013

Recensión: "Key terms in second language acquisition"

2011

Recensión: "Key terms in second language acquisition. Bill van Petten and Alessandro g. Benati. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010."

Function Words Constrain On-Line Recognition of Verbs and Nouns in French 18-Month-Olds

2013

In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun (“la balle”/the ball) or a target verb (“je mange”/I eat). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was preceded either by a correct function word (“une balle”/a ball or “on mange”/they eat), or by an incorrect function word, signaling a word from the other category (*“on balle”/they ball or *“une mange”/a eat). We showed that 18-month-olds exploit the syntactic context on-line to recognize the target word: verbs were recognized when preceded by a personal pronoun but not when preceded by a dete…

Constructions-and-frames analysis of translations

2013

Translation can generally be seen as a task in which the meaning of the original should be preserved as far as possible. This paper formulates the preservation of meaning in terms of theprimacy of the framehypothesis: ideally, the frame of the original is matched by the frame of the translation. I investigate one factor overriding this principle in translations between English and German through the examination of two grammatical constructions, one in English, one in German, which are not commonly available in the other language. Picking a construction comparable in function in the target language leads to frame shifts. In addition to highlighting the interplay between construction and fram…

Optimal reciprocals in German Sign Language

2003

Unlike most spoken languages, German Sign Language (DGS) does not have a single means of reciprocal marking. Rather, different strategies are used, which crucially depend on phonological (one-handed sign vs. two-handed sign) and morphosyntactic (plain verb vs. agreement verb) properties of the underlying verb. Moreover, with plain verbs DGS shows dialectal variation. Altogether there are four different ways of realizing reciprocal marking in DGS. In this paper, we compare a rule-based analysis for the reciprocal data (based on Brentari’s 1998 feature hierarchy) to an optimality-theoretic analysis. We argue that an OT-account allows for a more straightforward explanation of the facts. In par…

Phrase Frames as an Exploratory Tool for Studying English-to-Polish Translation Patterns: A Descriptive Corpus-Based Study

2020

Designed as a proof-of-concept, this descriptive corpus-based study focuses on the concept of phrase frame, defined as a contiguous sequence of n words identical except for one (Fletcher 2002). Although phrase frames were already used as a means of exploring pattern variability across and within different text types or registers written in English, they have been rarely, if ever, employed so far as a unit of analysis in descriptive research on translation. In this study, we use the English‒Polish parallel corpus Paralela (Pęzik 2016) to identify and describe Polish translation patterns that emerge from two functionally-defined English phrase frames (it is * clear that, it is * difficult to ). …