Abstract
With reference to the language pair English-Norwegian, the present paper discusses nominal phrases referring to so-called inalienable possessions. In such cases, the relation of possession is typically expressed through obligatory possessor marking in English, and through possessor suppression in Norwegian, i.e., whereas the use of possessive determiners is obligatory in English, the semantic property of inalienabilty is in Norwegian expressed by definite form and no possessive. Exampes illustrating this translational pattern will be presented, and some corpus data will be considered. This will support a prototypical view of what classes of nouns fall within the pattern. Since there is a systematic difference in inalienability marking between English and Norwegian, it will be argued that the translation of noun phrases referring to inalienables is predictable within this language pair, because it is derivable from information about the two language systems. Keywords : contrastive grammar; possession; inalienability marking; English-Norwegian translation; translational complexity
Highlights
The present paper is based on a discussion given in Thunes (2011) of a systematic difference between English and Norwegian in the use of determiners in definite noun phrases referring to objects of possession
Norwegian follows the strategy of possessor suppression, in which noun phrases referring to inalienable possessions have definite form and contain no possessive determiner, as shown by the NPs moren (‘the mother’) in (2a), and haken (‘the chin’) in (1a)
In Thunes (2011) translational complexity is studied in a selection of English-‐Norwegian parallel texts in order to investigate, firstly, to what extent the manually created target texts of that corpus could have been translated automatically, i.e. computed, within the rule-‐based approach, and, secondly, to find out whether the potential for automatisation varies between the two text types law and fiction, which are included in the material
Summary
The present paper is based on a discussion given in Thunes (2011) of a systematic difference between English and Norwegian in the use of determiners in definite noun phrases referring to objects of possession. In the Norwegian sentence (1a) it is understood that the subject referent is the possessor of the object referent; this is expressed by the definite form of haken. Lødrup (2010: 92) provides an account for this through the generalisation that “[b]ody-‐part nouns usually require a possessor to be syntactically realised when they denote actual parts of a body...” in sentence (1a) the possessor is expressed by the syntactic subject, and, according to Lødrup’s analysis, the definite noun phrase haken has an implicit possessive (2010: 92). The inalienability pattern of English and Norwegian will be described and illustrated, and related to translational complexity as defined by Thunes (2011). Various occurrences of the pattern will be discussed, in order to support a prototype view of the phenomenon
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