25.4435, Diss: English, German; Syntax, Text/Corpus Ling, Translation: Bisiada: 'From Hypotaxis to Parataxis...'

Thu Nov 6 17:25:26 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4435. Thu Nov 06 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4435, Diss: English, German; Syntax, Text/Corpus Ling, Translation: Bisiada: 'From Hypotaxis to Parataxis...'

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Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 12:22:40
From: Mario Bisiada [spidermonkey at gmx.de]
Subject: From Hypotaxis to Parataxis: An Investigation of English–German Syntactic Convergence in Translation

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Institution: University of Manchester 
Program: Translation & Intercultural Studies 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2013 

Author: Mario Bisiada

Dissertation Title: From Hypotaxis to Parataxis: An Investigation of
English–German Syntactic Convergence in Translation 

Dissertation URL:  https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/item/?pid=uk-ac-man-scw:214937

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics
                     Translation

Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     German (deu)

Dissertation Director(s):
Maeve Olohan
Erik Schleef
Luis Pérez González

Dissertation Abstract:

Guided by the hypothesis that translation is a language contact situation that
can influence language change, this study investigates a frequency shift from
hypotactic to paratactic constructions in concessive and causal clauses in
German management and business writing. The influence of the English SVO word
order is assumed to cause language users of German to prefer verb-second,
paratactic constructions to verb-final, hypotactic ones. The hypothesis is
tested using a 1 million word diachronic corpus containing German translations
and their source texts as well as a corpus of German non-translations. The
texts date from 1982–3 and 2008, which allows a diachronic analysis of changes
in the way English causal and concessive structures have been translated. The
analysis shows that in the translations, parataxis is indeed becoming more
frequent at the expense of hypotaxis, a phenomenon that, to some extent, also
occurs in the non-translations. Based on a corpus of unedited draft
translations, it can be shown that translators rather than editors are
responsible for this shift. Most of the evidence, however, suggests that the
shift towards parataxis is not predominantly caused by language contact with
English. Instead, there seems to be a development towards syntactically
simpler constructions in this genre, which is most evident in the strong
tendency towards sentence-splitting and an increased use of sentence-initial
conjunctions in translations and non-translations. This simplification seems
to be compensated for, to some extent, by the establishment of pragmatic
distinctions between specific causal and concessive conjunctions.

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