Syntactic Differences Research Articles

Особенности перевода произведений Ф.М. Достоевского на немецкий язык

The article considers the distinctive features of the German translations of two works by F. M. Dostoyevsky “Crime and Punishment” and “Poor folk”. The author of the article studies two variations of German translations (“Schuld und Sühne” and “Rodion Raskolnikoff”, and also two translations with the similar name “Arme Leute”), moreover, the author takes into consideration the reproduction of the way of life and Russian view of world, characters’ speech, and that’s why explores the full representation of peculiarities that take place in German translations. During the examination and comparison lexical, syntactical and stylistic differences between the original texts and their translations are revealed. The methods of translation are studied in German works, and the author comes to a conclusion that the examined methods of translation allow to convey the way of life, depicted in the original works of the Russian writer. The author of the article also compares the German translations and finds out the differences on levels of language, the variety of methods of translation, which indicates the style of translators.

SYNTACTIC AND LEXICAL ASPECTS OF STUDENTS’ LEGAL TRANSLATIONS AT THE POSTGRADUATE LEVEL

Teaching translation of legal texts into English at the postgraduate level at the Faculty of Philology (formerly at the Institute of Foreign Languages), University of Montenegro, started in 2004. At this study programme, students face for the first time challenges of translating legal texts. Although they occasionally translate some legal texts at the undergraduate level, this is the first time that they study legal translation in a systematic way. This certainly produces some challenges, that may be mainly observed on two levels: (1) syntactic level, where some students produce English sentences that are literal translations of Montenegrin sentences; bearing in mind syntactic differences in the languages, this sometimes leads to a loss of meaning or distorted meaning in translations; and (2) lexical level, where there are differences in the English and Montenegrin legal systems, which certainly requires caution in translation; it is possible to identify some inconsistencies in using legal terminology because some Montenegrin concepts cannot be always simply transferred into English without looking more deeply into the legal systems. The paper discusses the notions of formal fidelity vs. fidelity to the “uniform intent” of the text (Šarčević, 1997) or what Hatim and Munday (2004) refer to as literal and free translation. These notions are crucial for my discussion of causes of errors in my students’ translations.

Really the word is found … (On the Linguistic Characteristics and Reasons for the Popularity of toksichnyj (toxic), the “Word of the Year”)

The article deals with the semantics and syntactical features of the word toxic named “word of the year” (2018) by the Oxford Dictionary. In Russian, its analogue – toksichnyj – has also gained immense popularity and almost unlimited metaphorical compatibility in expressions that characterize interpersonal relationships. The author shows semantic and syntactic differences between the word токсичный (“toxic”) and its synonym ядовитый (“poisonous”). The article analyzes the word as a privately-estimated predicate that is species-specific with respect to the Russian predicate плохой (“bad”). The author proposes a hypothesis of the spread of this word in the language, associated with the transfer of the qualities of an inanimate object to an animate, characteristic of the modern representation of man as an artifact.

A filter for syntactically incomparable parallel sentences

Abstract Massive automatic comparison of languages in parallel corpora will greatly speed up and enhance comparative syntactic research. Automatically extracting and mining syntactic differences from parallel corpora requires a pre-processing step that filters out sentence pairs that cannot be compared syntactically, for example because they involve “free” translations. In this paper we explore four possible filters: the Damerau-Levenshtein distance between POS-tags, the sentence-length ratio, the graph-edit distance between dependency parses, and a combination of the three in a logistic regression model. Results suggest that the dependency-parse filter is the most stable throughout language pairs, while the combination filter achieves the best results.

Investigating teachers’ perceptions of syntactic complexity in L2 academic writing

This paper aims to investigate how L2 teachers perceive syntactic complexity in L2 writing, and to what extent teachers’ judgements are related to current theoretical views. The main reason for conducting the study is that the majority of studies that have investigated the development of syntactic complexity in L2 have been grounded in hypothesis-testing research; few studies, however, have explored whether teachers’ perspectives on syntactic complexity reflect the development of syntactic complexity as hypothesised in the SLA literature. Two groups of language teachers (eleven of L2-Dutch and sixteen of L2-Italian) were asked to evaluate individually the syntactic complexity of a sample of argumentative texts written by L2 university students of, respectively, Dutch and Italian. In the panel discussion that followed, teachers discussed their motivation behind their assigned scores and the feedback they had proposed. The results revealed that teachers tended to focus primarily on accuracy and comprehensibility. When their comments were concerned with syntactic complexity, both similarities and differences (related to target language and writing context) emerged between Dutch and Italian. Teachers’ reflections appeared to be only partly aligned with existing theoretical views on syntactic complexity.

Syntactic Aspects of Lithuanian-Spanish Translation of Fiction and Scientific Texts

Summary Translators, linguists and translation researchers often have to deal with subtle and sometimes complex syntactical aspects involved in translation. Properly conveying the structure and rhythm of a sentence or text in another language is a difficult task that requires a good understanding of syntactical aspects of both the source and the target language. The morphology of Lithuanian verbs and nouns, and specially its system of declensions and cases, without any doubt facilitates a relatively flexible word order. Many linguists also agree that word order in the Spanish sentence is also freer than in French, English or other modern languages. It has often been said that Spanish has the most flexible word order of all Romance languages. However, Spanish word order is by no means as free as in Lithuanian. A comparative study of Lithuanian texts and their translation into Spanish allows a better understanding of the syntactical differences between both languages. This article examines a case of syntactical inversion in Lithuanian: the displacement of the direct object and its location at the beginning of the sentence, and the translation of such sentences into Spanish. In Spanish the direct object usually follows the verb, except in the cases when that function is carried out by pronouns. In order to displace a direct object to the beginning of the sentence, Spanish syntactical structures should be used. In this article two stylistically different Lithuanian texts will be compared with their Spanish translation so as to identify the linguistic means used in each case. A comparative analysis of different types of texts is useful to reveal the Spanish syntactical structures chosen by the translators as well as certain tendencies in each specific context.

SrcDiff: A syntactic differencing approach to improve the understandability of deltas

AbstractAn efficient and scalable rule‐based syntactic differencing approach is presented. The tool srcDiff is built upon the srcML infrastructure. srcML adds abstract syntactic information into the code via an XML format. A syntactic difference of srcML documents is then taken. During this process, the differences are further refined using a set of rules that model typical editing patterns of source code by developers. Thus, the resulting deltas model edits that are programmer centric versus a purely syntactic tree edit view. Other syntactic differencing approaches focus on obtaining an optimal tree edit distance with the assumption that this will produce an accurate difference. While this may work well for small or simple changes, the differences quickly become unreadable for more complex changes. By contrast, the approach presented here purposely deviates from an optimal tree edit difference in order to create a delta that is both easier to understand and better models changes between the original and modified. To evaluate the approach, a comparison user study against a state‐of‐the‐art syntactic differencing approach and two line‐based differencing tools is conducted as an online within‐participant study with about 70 subjects on 14 sample changes. The results provide support that the rule‐based syntactic differencing produces more accurate and understandable deltas.

Function matching between binary executables: efficient algorithms and features

Binary diffing consists in comparing syntactic and semantic differences of two programs in binary form, when source code is unavailable. It can be reduced to a graph isomorphism problem between the Control Flow Graphs, Call Graphs or other forms of graphs of the compared programs. Here we present REveal, a prototype tool which implements a binary diffing algorithm and an associated set of features, extracted from a binary’s CG and CFGs. Additionally, we explore the potential of applying Markov lumping techniques on function CFGs. The proposed algorithm and features are evaluated in a series of experiments on executables compiled for i386, amd64, arm and aarch64. Furthermore, the effectiveness of our prototype tool, code-named REveal, is assessed in a second series of experiments involving clustering of a corpus of 18 malware samples into 5 malware families. REveal’s results are compared against those produced by Diaphora, the most widely used binary diffing software of the public domain. We conclude that REveal improves the state-of-the-art in binary diffing by achieving higher matching scores, obtained at the cost of a slight running time increase, in most of the experiments conducted. Furthermore, REveal successfully partitions the malware corpus into clusters consisting of samples of the same malware family.

Telicity and mode of merge in L2 acquisition of resultatives

ABSTRACTResultative constructions show a wide range of cross-linguistic variation, which may pose nontrivial challenges to L2 learners. This study investigates how syntactic and semantic differences between L1 and L2 affect L2 acquisition of resultatives. In particular, we investigate how L1-Korean learners project the syntax and semantics of L2-English resultative constructions. Two different experiments are presented. The first is a comprehension test that employs an acceptability judgment task and an elicited choice task, and the second is a production test using an elicited writing task. Our experimental results consistently show that Korean learners project English resultatives with adjunct structures and interpret them as atelic events, in sharp contrast to native speakers of English. This finding is in line with previous studies in demonstrating that L1 syntax plays a crucial role in projecting L2 syntax. More importantly, this study provides novel evidence that L1 semantics (i.e., telicity) crucially influences L2 acquisition, in tandem with (but over and above) L1 syntax. The study’s results imply that a proper theory of L2 acquisition of resultatives must consider not only syntactic transfer effects but also subtle semantic differences between L1 and L2.

Instructors’ Awareness of the Syntactic and Morphological Differences between British and American English

This study explores Turkish English as a foreign language (EFL) instructors’ awareness of the syntactic and morphological variation in British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). The data were collected through a survey which was administered to 38 EFL instructors working at preparatory schools of different universities. The participants were asked to analyze 49 sentence-pairs in the survey to decide whether given sentences were correct or incorrect. The results indicated a) that the participants were better at recognizing the morphology and syntax of BrE than AmE, b) that of all the participants, the ones who were exposed to both varieties were better at recognizing the different uses of the syntactic and morphological forms in BrE and AmE than the ones exposing to the forms only in one variety, c) that the departments the participants graduated from did not have an impact on the recognition of the differences between BrE and AmE in syntax and morphology.

The Influce of Syntax on Learning The Second :The Example of Kurdish and Arabic

The research entitled (Effect of syntax level in learning the second language - Kurdish and Arabic language model). The aim of the research is to determine the effect of syntactic structures especially phrase structure in the process of learning the second language. The research is divided into three sections. The first section presents a theoretical framework on linguistic concepts and theories in the process of learning the second language. In the second part of the research we identified the syntactic structures and phrases in the Kurdish language. Among the phrases: noun phrase, verb phrase, adverb phrase and adjective phrase. We also defined concepts; such as: head, complement and adjunct in the structure of the internal structure of the phrases. We introduced syntax, sentence structure, and phrases order in sentence. The third part of the research is devoted to the syntactic structures and phrases in the Arabic language. We introduced the structure and structure of the sentence and the order of phrases syntax sentence. We discussed the concept of (Ordering) in the Arabic sentence. We also identified the similarities and differences between the structure of the phrases in the two languages (Kurdish and Arabic), and the most important research findings that knowledge of similarities and Syntactic differences between the two languages ​​is a factor in the learning of the second language.

Transform, Combine, and Transfer

Transfer parsing has been used for developing dependency parsers for languages with no treebank by using transfer from treebanks of other languages (source languages). In delexicalized transfer, parsed words are replaced by their part-of-speech tags. Transfer parsing may not work well if a language does not follow uniform syntactic structure with respect to its different constituent patterns. Earlier work has used information derived from linguistic databases to transform a source language treebank to reduce the syntactic differences between the source and the target languages. We propose a transformation method where a source language pattern is transformed stochastically to one of the multiple possible patterns followed in the target language. The transformed source language treebank can be used to train a delexicalized parser in the target language. We show that this method significantly improves the average performance of single-source delexicalized transfer parsers. We also show that, in the multi-source settings, parsers trained using a concatenation of transformed source language treebanks work better when a subset of the source language treebanks is used rather than concatenating all of them or only one. However, the problem of selecting the subset of treebanks whose combination gives the best-performing parser from the set of all the available treebanks is hard. We propose a greedy selection heuristic based on the labelled attachment scores of the corresponding single-source parsers trained using the treebanks after transformation.

Syntax-Based Chinese-Vietnamese Tree-to-Tree Statistical Machine Translation with Bilingual Features

Because of the scarcity of bilingual corpora, current Chinese--Vietnamese machine translation is far from satisfactory. Considering the differences between Chinese and Vietnamese, we investigate whether linguistic differences can be used to supervise machine translation and propose a method of syntax-based Chinese--Vietnamese tree-to-tree statistical machine translation with bilingual features. Analyzing the syntax differences between Chinese and Vietnamese, we define some linguistic difference-based rules, such as attributive position, time adverbial position, and locative adverbial position, and create rewards for similar rules. These rewards are integrated into the extraction of tree-to-tree translation rules, and we optimize the pruning of the search space during the decoding phase. The experiments on Chinese--Vietnamese bilingual sentence translation show that the proposed method performs better than several compared methods. Further, the results show that syntactic difference features, with search pruning, can improve the accuracy of machine translation without degrading the efficiency.

Recomplementation in English and Spanish: Delineating the CP space

The paper aims to provide a characterization of the colloquial phenomenon of recomplementation (i.e., that1/que1 – XP[dislocated] – that2/que2 constructions) in both contemporary English and Spanish from a comparative perspective. I draw a systematic comparison between that2 and que2 and present a host of similarities in terms of the syntactic behavior and distribution of secondary complementizers in the two languages. Thus, I argue for a unified analysis of recomplementation in English and Spanish within Rizzi’s (1997 et seq.) split-CP hypothesis wherein the flanked dislocate occupies the specifier of TopicP, whose head is spelled out as that2/que2. I therefore show that the structures of the peripheries of English and Spanish are not as different as they may appear to be at first sight. I also note several asymmetries between the two languages in terms of the interaction between recomplementation patterns and other constructions, and submit that these differences can be ascribed to independent factors: they are due to lexico-semantic and syntactic differences displayed by the two languages, but not to a different underlying left-peripheral architecture. The paper also investigates the reason(s) why secondary thats/ques are lexically realized and argues for the polyvalent nature of such iterative complementizers. I further propose that one of their functions is to mark discourse. The findings reported here also have far-reaching consequences for the contentious derivation of preposed topical phrases in the syntax of English and Spanish (including adjunct clauses), as well as ramifications to other existing debates.

Differences in sentence complexity in the text of children's picture books and child-directed speech.

Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on several syntactic differences between the text of children's picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which picture book text may systematically differ from typical child-directed speech. The analyses show that picture books contain more rare and complex sentence types, including passive sentences and sentences containing relative clauses, than does child-directed speech. These differences in the patterns of language contained in picture books and typical child-directed speech suggest that one important means by which picture book reading may come to be associated with improved language outcomes is by providing children with types of complex language that might be otherwise rare in their input.

Acquisition of English Tense and Aspect Translation Competence by Behdini Students: An Experimental Study

This study is an attempt to investigate the acquisition of translation competence of the English tense and aspect system by Behdini learners who are students at the Translation Department at the College of Languages in the University of Duhok. This paper is an experimental study that adopts the Translation Competence Acquisition model. There are many morphological and syntactic differences between English and Behdini tense and aspect and there are differences in terms of the usage of the tense and aspect between the two mentioned languages too. A Judgement Elicitation Task is employed as a tool to collect data in this study. 4o English sentences with their translations into Behdini are included in this task. Behdini learners are asked to make their judgements on each translated sentence. These test items are a mixture of four tenses: present continuous, present perfect, past continuous, and past perfect. Two subgroups of learners are involved in this study: the senior subgroup and the fresher subgroup in an attempt to investigate the effect of participants’ English language level and proficiency. Mixed-effects modeling has been used for analysing the data statistically. The lmer package (version is 3.3.1) has been employed with logit link function and binomial variance for the judgement data in R, which is an open-source language and environment for statistical computing. The main hypothesis of the study is that Behdini learners are not expected to attain a complete translation competence regarding the English tense and aspect system due to the differences between the two languages. The main results of the study show that while Behdini learners were able to attain a good translation competence in terms of accepting the grammatical translations, they failed to reject the ungrammatical translations. These findings implicate that Behdini learners’ acquisition of translation competence is not attained fully. It is also shown that Behdini students at lower proficiency levels employ their L1 grammar as the first stage of their translation process, but at later stages of proficiency parameter resetting becomes more possible.

A realização de sujeitos e objetos pronominais no português uruguaio

O objetivo do trabalho é descrever a realização de sujeitos e objetos pronominais no português uruguaio (PU) a partir de um corpus de dados orais. Enquanto o português brasileiro (PB) apresenta em torno de 80% de sujeitos pronominais preenchidos, no PU há 50% de sujeitos referenciais nulos, com preferência de preenchimento para a 1ª pessoa do singular e predominância de nulos especialmente na 1ª pessoa do plural. Os objetos podem ser realizados como clíticos (incluindo a 3ª pessoa) ou como pronomes retos. A colocação dos clíticos apresenta próclise categórica aos verbos flexionados e gerúndio e ênclise com infinitivos e imperativos, além de subidas de clítico e redobro de clíticos. Objetos anafóricos podem ser retomados por nulos, clíticos ou pronomes retos, estando a retomada condicionada a traços semânticos do antecedente. Tanto na posição de sujeito quanto na posição de objeto, pronomes retos de 3ª pessoa ocorrem somente com referentes humanos. Os dados confirmam a existência de diferenças sintáticas significativas entre PU e PB.

Linguistic Intercomprehension in Vocational Translation Training (The Case of English, Spanish, Russian)

According to a common adage, translation is not about translating words but about translating meanings. One and the same meaning, thus, in different languages can be rendered by different linguistic means. Mastering the art of translation often means juggling a variety of these linguistic means in two or more languages. Traditionally, translators for international organizations have worked from a foreign language (so- called languages B/C) into their native language (so-called language A). Today, however, in the increasingly global world, translators are more often than not required to be able to work into at least one, usually two, foreign languages. Moreover, sometimes translators may find themselves tasked with working from language C into language B, i.e. from one foreign language into another, leaving their native language out of the equation altogether. Schools of translation do not normally offer this kind of training. To respond to the growing professional demand, however, there emerged a need for research and teaching strategy development for such a course. This paper outlines a sequence of teaching activities for a group of Russian speaking students majoring in International Media and Communication Studies at MGIMO-University (Moscow State Institute of International Relations). The students, all of whom are native Russian speakers, have reached CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) C1 level in English and CEFR B2 in Spanish, and are currently taking two professionally-oriented translation courses, from English into Russian and from Spanish into Russian. The paper puts forward a lesson plan where the students are taught translation from Spanish (language C) into English (language B). The activities are aimed at identifying syntactical and lexical differences and similarities between English and Spanish, as well as conducting a comparative analysis of the students’ native language, Russian. The paper argues that translation from one foreign language into another is facilitated by linguistic intercomprehension, a field in linguistic research that emerged relatively recently and has so far mainly focused on intercomprehension in language teaching.

An interactive web app for retrieval, visualization, and analysis of hydrologic and meteorological time series data

As wireless sensor networks become more prevalent tools for analyzing watershed dynamics, the integration and management of the myriad of available data streams presents a unique challenge. Web-based platforms provide tools to retrieve and visualize hydrologic and meteorologic data from various sources while addressing syntactic and semantic differences in data formats. However, current platforms are limited by a lack of data analysis tools. The Stream Hydrology And Rainfall Knowledge System (SHARKS) app was developed to expand upon existing platforms by providing a suite of exploratory data analysis features including the ability to calculate the total precipitation depth recorded for any period, interpolate the average annual recurrence interval for precipitation events, perform hydrograph separations, and calculate the volume of runoff for any period. A case study provides a conceptual description of the types of rapid analysis that can be performed using the SHARKS app.

Questions with definite markers in (Old) Romance, with focus on Old Spanish

We will depart from the observation that Romance languages can be subdivided into two groups with respect to free relatives under question-embedding predicates (Kellert 2017). One group has grammaticalized the definite element (e.g. Pt.[1] o, Fl. i’ ‘the’) and que/che into one question pronoun (e.g. Pt. o que ‘what’ and Fl. icche ‘what’); the other group has not (e.g. Spanish and French). We will show that in one group free relatives that are embedded under question predicates resemble more complex nouns (as in Spanish and French), whereas in the other group they are clausal and have the structure of ordinary questions as in Portuguese and Florentine. We will look at the evolution of lo que sentences in Old Spanish and demonstrate that they were used as relative clauses under non-question predicates such as ser ‘be’ and factive predicates such as ‘know’ with much higher frequency than under genuine question predicates such as preguntar ‘to ask’. We will suggest that the interrogative interpretation of lo que- relative clauses has its source in the ambiguity of factive predicates. Factive predicates can select both DPs interpreted as definite descriptions and CPs interpreted as interrogatives. Lo que-relatives can thus be interpreted as definite descriptions and as interrogatives under factive predicates. As we will argue, this ambiguous interpretation was the precondition for the use of lo que-sentences to be used in non-ambiguous question contexts. However, the reanalysis of lo que-sentences as questions has not been fully accomplished in Modern Spanish in contrast to Modern Portuguese, as these sentences still show syntactic and semantic differences from ordinary questions.[1] Fl. stands for Florentine, Sp. for Spanish, Pt. for Portuguese, and Fr. for French. Mo. for Modern and O. for Old and Mi. for Middle languages.