This article explores the relevance-theory view of utterance interpretation (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) and illustrates its application in a qualitative investigation of authentic corpus data. The purpose is to show that observations derived from corpora can shed significant light on how constraints on relevance are practised by real speakers in real discourse contexts. The study focuses on discourse markers and argues that there is a need to focus more systematically on emerging discourse markers and their contributions to relevance. It is argued that the corpus-based approach can lead to new knowledge about pragmatic functions and subtle differences between different items, and that this extends beyond what is gained from a strictly theoretical or experimental approach, by far the most common approaches in the previous relevance-theory literature. As a case in point, the article includes an empirical study of the discourse marker as if, based on the large English TenTen corpus (Jakubíček et al., 2013).
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The trilogy The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien is appropriately called the fundamental writing of fantasy literature. The story of the battle between good and evil, which continues to amaze readers around the world almost 70 years after it was first published, has been translated into dozens of languages, including Chinese. The work is typical for its detailed description of the landscape. The high frequency of local names raises the question of how translators work with them when translating into foreign languages. In the case of Chinese, the applied procedures are even more interesting, as it is a language with a typologically different writing system. The paper presents the results of a lexicological analysis of place names, which led to identifying not only all applied loanword categories but also which of them was the most productive one for borrowing toponyms. Based on the analysis of 512 toponyms, the following types of loanwords have been recognized: phonetic loanwords, hybrid loanwords, calques, semantic loanwords and induced new creations. The most productive loanword categories are phonetic loanwords, calques, and hybrid loanwords.
The paper presents the findings of a detailed analysis of the position and syntactic functions of the rheme in English and Czech parallel texts representing four different genres. First, separate syntactic structures are compared with a view to ascertaining to what extent the position and the syntactic function of the rheme are retained. Then the means of indicating the rheme (word order, semantics, context, intonation and specific syntactic structures) are analysed. Findings are presented with quantitative data.
The article treats the phenomenon of aspiration in Mandarin Chinese and English within a broader linguistic context. The topics discussed are (1) both the general and language-specific articulatory and acoustic make-up of aspirated consonants (long overall duration, tense articulation, long VOT; the alternative sources of aspiration friction are recalled, as opposed to a common view emphasizing mainly the glottal friction) and (2) the dissimilar functioning of aspiration in English and Mandarin Chinese (English: a secondary phonetic feature of stops /p/, /t/, /k/ in particular positions; Chinese: an essential distinctive feature of the consonantal subsystem operating in three pairs of stops and three pairs of affricates). After reviewing possible options for making phonological contrast in stops (and affricates) employing the laryngeal phonological features [± voiced] and [± aspirated], the author presents cross-linguistically manifold ways of phonetic realizations of the phonological categories chosen by a particular language (the polarization principle, Magnet Model Theory and Trubetzkoy’s “phonological sieve” are introduced as a possible explanation of the diversity). The author points out that the described complexity causes numerous problems in consonant production and perception in second language learning, the mistakes being diverse depending on the native language of the student.
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