Cross-Linguistic Variation in System and Text

The series serves to propagate investigations into language usage, especially with respect to computational support. This includes all forms of text handling activity, not only interlingual translations, but also conversions carried out in response to different communicative tasks. Among the major topics are problems of text transfer and the interplay between human and machine activities.

The intuition that translations are somehow different from texts that are not translations has been around for many years, but most of the common linguistic frameworks are not comprehensive enough to account for the wealth and complexity of linguistic phenomena that make a translation a special kind of text.

The present book provides a novel methodology for investigating the specific linguistic properties of translations. As this methodology is both corpus-based and driven by a functional theory of language, it is powerful enough to account for the multi-dimensional nature of cross-linguistic variation in translations and cross-lingually comparable texts.

1 Introduction
1.1 Goals
1.2 Motivation
1.3 Methods
1.4 Road map through this book

2 State-of-the-art
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Multilingual research: objectives and methods
2.3 Hawkins' comparative typology of English and German
2.4 Doherty's research on English-German contrasts in translations
2.5 Baker's universal features of translations
2.6 Contrastive linguistics: register analysis
2.7 Summary and conclusions

3 Theory and Model of cross-linguistic variation
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Systemic Functional Linguistics: theory and model
3.3 Model of multilinguality
3.4 Summary and envoi

4 System: English-German grammatical contrasts and commonalities
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The grammar of the clause
4.3 Other ranks
4.4 Summary of major contrasts and commonalities

5 Text: English-German parallel, multilingually comparable and monolingually comparable texts
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Hypotheses and their testing
5.3 Analyses and interpretation of hypotheses
5.4 Summary and conclusions

6 Summary and conclusions
6.1 Summary: Cross-linguistic variation in multilingual texts
6.2 Assessment of the methodology
6.3 Envoi: Other contexts of application and issues for future research

Appendix A: Text sources
Appendix B: Statistical table
Appendix C: Analysis results in tabular form
Notes
References
Subject Index
Author Index