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Article published In: Target
Vol. 34:1 (2022) ► pp.130–162

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An intermodal approach to cohesion in constrained and unconstrained language

ORCiD logo with link | Adam Mickiewicz University
Published online: 20 April 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.19186.kaj
Abstract
This article investigates cohesion in the spoken and written registers of constrained language varieties to highlight the similarities and differences in the cohesion patterns of mediated (i.e., interpreted and translated) and non-native texts with respect to original texts produced by native speakers. In particular, it examines how different types of cohesive devices are distributed across spoken and written native, non-native, and mediated speeches originally delivered impromptu and read out at the plenary sessions of the European Parliament. The dataset comes from the European Translation and Interpreting Corpus (EPTIC) (Ferraresi, Adriano, and Silvia Bernardini. 2019. “A Many-Sided, Multi-Purpose Corpus of EU Parliament Proceedings.” In Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies: New Resources and Applications, edited by Irene Doval and M. Teresa Sánchez Nieto, 123–139. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The context provides a rare opportunity to examine the spoken and written registers of professional communication, both mono- and multilingual, in a relatively homogenous setting. First, in the exploratory analysis, I investigate the distribution of different types of cohesive devices across the investigated varieties drawing on mosaic plots and correspondence analysis. Thereafter, I make use of regression modelling of the overall frequency of cohesive devices across the examined varieties to evaluate the effect of constrainedness, mode of delivery, and individual variation. The results indicate that non-native and mediated texts do diverge from native production in the use of cohesive devices, but in different ways.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: What is constrained language?
  • 2.Constrained language and its linguistic properties
  • 3.Cohesive devices in bilingual speech production
    • 3.1Cohesive devices in translation and interpreting
    • 3.2Cohesive devices in non-native language use
  • 4.Research design and data
    • 4.1Research questions
    • 4.2Data
    • 4.3Method
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Patterns of use of various types of cohesive devices across constrained and unconstrained varieties in spoken and written registers (RQ1)
    • 5.2Predicting the total frequency of cohesive devices in the spoken register from text variety and mode of source event delivery mode (RQ2)
      • 5.2.1Total frequency of cohesive devices in the spoken register (excluding phrase-level coordinators)
      • 5.2.2Total frequency of phrase-level coordinators in the spoken register
    • 5.3Predicting the total frequency of cohesive devices in the written register from text variety and source event delivery mode (RQ3)
      • 5.3.1Total frequency of cohesive devices in the written register (excluding phrase-level coordinators)
      • 5.3.2Total frequency of phrase-level coordinators in the written register
    • 5.4Similarity of frequency patterns across spoken and written register (RQ4)
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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