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Theme in English and German
A corpus-based contrastive analysis of clause openings in original and translated texts
This book represents a detailed discussion and corpus analysis of Theme in English and German originals and translations. The empirical results are based on thousands of clauses from four different registers, cover a variety of linguistic aspects including multiple Themes, marked Themes, participant roles, agency, and identifiability, and are tested statistically using regression analyses. The book sheds light on one of the most elusive concepts of the systemic functional linguistics framework, Theme, by comparing it with different approaches, related concepts, and realizations in different languages and by examining empirically different Theme models, contrastive differences, and translation effects. Given that Theme in English and German is realized formally by being the first clause constituent and is thus, effectively, a syntactic phenomenon, this monograph is not only relevant for functional linguists, but any interested in English and German word order differences and their effects on translations.
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 112] 2023. xiii, 297 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 27 July 2023
Published online on 27 July 2023
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Spelling conventions and examples | pp. xi–11
- List of abbreviations | pp. xiii–13
- Chapter 1. Introduction | pp. 1–6
- Chapter 2. English and German clause structure | pp. 7–20
- Chapter 3. Systemic Functional Linguistics | pp. 21–31
- Chapter 4. Theme | pp. 32–74
- Chapter 5. Basic concepts in translation studies | pp. 75–79
- Chapter 6. Methodology | pp. 80–96
- Chapter 7. Theme in German | pp. 97–129
- Chapter 8. Theme in English | pp. 130–155
- Chapter 9. Theme differences between English and German | pp. 156–178
- Chapter 10. Theme in English-German translations | pp. 179–241
- Chapter 11. Summary and conclusion | pp. 242–255
- References | pp. 257–270
- Appendix | p. 271
- Index | p. 297
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Freiwald, Jonas & Stella Neumann
Neumann, Stella, Elma Kerz & Arndt Heilmann
2024. Comparing contact effects in translation and second language writing. In Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings [Contact Language Library, 60], ► pp. 223 ff.
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