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Article published In: Languages in Contrast
Vol. 17:1 (2017) ► pp.18–42

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A contrastive analysis of reporting clauses in comparable and translated academic texts in English and Italian

 | University of Turin (Italy)
Published online: 13 February 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17.1.02mol
Abstract
This article investigates the use of finite reporting clauses with that-clause complementation (e.g. I will suggest that…) as devices for the expression of stance in academic texts (Hyland, K. and Tse, P. 2005. Hooking the Reader: A Corpus Study of Evaluative That in Abstracts. English for Specific Purposes 24(2): 123–139. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Charles, M. 2006. The Construction of Stance in Reporting Clauses: A Cross-Disciplinary Study of Theses. Applied Linguistics 27(3): 492–518. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). These constructions are compared to their functional equivalents in Italian, i.e. reporting clauses with che (‘that’) complementiser. The comparison is carried out using a corpus-based approach, involving the analysis of a parallel corpus of Political Science papers in English and their translations into Italian, as well as a comparable corpus of articles originally written in Italian within the same discipline. Thanks to their ability to convey evaluative meanings, reporting clauses are analysed as structures that may provide insights into the epistemological negotiations taking place in the encounter of different research traditions through the practice of translation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Reporting that-clauses, writer stance and epistemology
  • 3.Cross-linguistic observations
  • 4.Materials and methods
    • 4.1From Socialist Register to Socialist Register Italia
    • 4.2Design criteria in the compilation of the comparable corpus
    • 4.3Analytical procedure
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Source
    • 5.2Grammatical subject
    • 5.3Type of verb
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
References (43)
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