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Article published In: Languages in Contrast
Vol. 19:2 (2019) ► pp.232–255

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English presentative semantic patterns as seen through a parallel translation corpus

ORCiD logo with link | Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic)
 | Charles University, Prague (Czech Republic)
Published online: 4 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17007.mal
Abstract
The present paper studies the English presentative semantic pattern whose function is to introduce a new phenomenon into the discourse, relating it to an already established location. A contrastive (English-Czech) cross-linguistic corpus-assisted approach is applied to explore syntactically diverse forms which represent the same presentative semantic pattern: ‘location – presentation verb – new phenomenon’. We focus on English sentences in which the location is expressed syntactically as the subject. The English constructions with a locative subject were detected as translation counterparts of Czech sentence-initial locative adverbials realized by prepositional phrases. Our study demonstrates that the potential of the sentence to introduce a new phenomenon in discourse is primarily based on the semantics of the verb.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.English presentative constructions
  • 3.Czech translation correspondences of English presentative constructions
  • 4.Material and method
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Step one: From Czech to English
      • 5.1.1The transitive verb pattern (SVO)
      • 5.1.2The intransitive verb pattern (SVA)
      • 5.1.3The passive verb pattern (SVpassA)
      • 5.1.4The copular verb pattern (SVCs (+comp))
      • 5.1.5Semantics of presentation verbs
    • 5.2Step two: English original texts
      • 5.2.1Verbs of ‘light/sound/smell emission or movement’
      • 5.2.2‘Contain / be covered’ and ‘manifestation’ verbs
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Primary source
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