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In:When Data Challenges Theory: Unexpected and paradoxical evidence in information structure
Edited by Davide Garassino and Daniel Jacob
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 273] 2022
► pp. 271–304

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Translation as a source of pragmatic interference?

An empirical investigation of French and Italian cleft sentences

 | University of Zurich | ZHAW, Winterthur
Published online: 22 February 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.273.09gar
Abstract
In this paper, we pursue two main (interconnected) goals, relying on a comparable and parallel corpus of French and Italian cleft sentences. First, we assess the most typical formal and functional properties of clefts in these languages, while also considering variation due to the different types of data. Second, we verify the presence of interference in the translation of clefts from French into Italian. Translators’ choices mostly align with information-structural patterns found in original Italian texts, but word-for-word translation styles can increase the frequency of less-common cleft types in Italian, such as Broad Focus and Information Focus clefts. However, odd or infelicitous pragmatic effects arise only in very few cases.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cleft sentences in French and Italian
    • 2.1Frequency
    • 2.2Form and meaning
    • 2.3Information structure
      • Information focus
      • Contrastive focus
      • Contrastive topics
      • Anaphoric CC clefts
    • 2.4French and Italian in translation
  • 3.Corpus presentation and research questions
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Research questions and hypotheses
  • 4.Quantitative analysis
    • 4.1Frequency
    • 4.2Form of clefts
    • 4.3Information structure
    • 4.4Interim discussion
  • 5.Translation of French clefts into Italian
    • 5.1Translation of French clefts: A first glance
    • 5.2Understanding the translation of cleft sentences: Conditional inference trees and random forests
    • 5.3Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (55)
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