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Dative alternation in Italian-to-Dutch translation

A corpus-based study of the effect of structural priming

ORCiD logo with link | Universiteit Gent, Belgium
 | Universiteit Gent, Belgium
 | Universiteit Gent, Belgium
 | Universiteit Gent, Belgium
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Abstract
This study investigates the effect of structural priming on dative alternation in Italian-to-Dutch translation. We analyse variation between the double object construction (DOC) and the prepositional object construction (POC) to determine whether the dative structure in the Italian source text influences the Dutch target text, while controlling for key language-internal factors. The methodology is corpus-based and applies a generalized linear mixed-effects model to a richly annotated dataset of translated sentence pairs (N = 719). Results show that the Italian construction significantly predicts the Dutch target construction, along with several conditioning variables: animacy of the recipient, length difference between theme and recipient, definiteness of the recipient, and the specific verb involved. These findings align with previous corpus-based studies on structural priming in translation (De Sutter, G., Colleman, T. and Ghyselen, A. S. 2021. Intra- and Inter-Textual Syntactic Priming in Original and Translated English. Cognitive Sociolinguistics Revisited 481: 410–438. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, De Sutter, G., Lefer, M. A. and Vanroy, B. 2023. Is Linguistic Decision-Making Constrained by the Same Cognitive Factors in Student and in Professional Translation? Evidence from Subject Placement in French-to-Dutch News Translation. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 9(1): 61–96. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), contribute to the Shared Representation Model (Schaeffer, M. and Carl, M. 2013. Shared Representations and the Translation Process: A Recursive Model. Translation and Interpreting Studies 8(2): 169–190. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), and support the relevance of corpus-based approaches in structural priming research in translation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Dative alternation in Dutch and Italian
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Compilation of the dataset
    • 3.2Annotation of the dataset
    • 3.3Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Random effects
    • 4.2Fixed effects
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (68)
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