Semantico-syntactic environments of the verbs show and demonstrate and Spanish mostrar and demostrar in a bilingual corpus of medical research articles

Abstract

The verbs show and demonstrate, and their potential Spanish counterparts mostrar and demostrar, are frequent lexical verbs appearing in various settings in medical research articles (RAs). This study analyses the contextual environments of these verbs in an extensive corpus of medical RAs, composed of three subcorpora: English source texts, their Spanish translations, and comparable Spanish native language texts. The verbs are analysed in terms of syntax (active and passive) and the semantics of the main associated noun: ‘Characteristics’, ‘Authors’, ‘Evidence’, ‘Techniques’, and ‘Metatextual’. The study uses quantitative and qualitative methods in a three-way analysis: intralinguistic analysis compares the environments for the verb pairs in English and Spanish; interlinguistic analysis assesses similarities and differences in the environments between the two native language subcorpora; and comparison of source and target texts provides insight into translation behaviour. The implications for translation are discussed in terms of context, collocation and appropriateness of discourse style.