202 Kerstin Kunz and Erich Steiner
- Comparing cohesion in English and German
1.1 State of the art^1Over the past decades, substantial insights have been gained in the area of contras-
tive research on English and German. However, the main methodological orien-
tation of work in the past has been hermeneutic/descriptive and example-based,
rather than empirical. It has been system- rather than text-based, and its focus
has been on the linguistic levels of morphology, syntax, and to some extent lexis,
rather than on text/ discourse.
In the system-based studies, texts are used as sources for illustrative examples.
They have their basis in pre-existing studies, lexical resources, grammars, linguis-
tic theories, or sometimes in ‘stylistics’, depending on the level they focus on.
Their coverage for English and German grammar is quite extensive, yet there is
no system-based contrastive text-grammar English-German.
Text-based approaches use texts as sources for examples and for statistical
patterns of lexico-grammatical or cohesive phenomena. Their findings are empiri-
cal, for example absolute or relative and proportional frequencies of phenomena.
However, there are several significant gaps in coverage here, most notably text-
based contrastive clause grammars and even more text/discourse grammars for
English-German. By using a text corpus including aligned translational data for
English and German we hope to benefit from several advantages of a text-based
model: first, a broadened perspective in terms of range of ‘phenomena’ of cohe-
sion, second, the possibility of discovering different ‘functions’ of these resources
in different contexts, and third, the accessibility of ‘frequencies’ of use of these
resources as indicators of registers.
Our aim in this paper is an overview of contrasts in cohesive substitution
between English and German, starting with a clarification of the relationship
between cohesive reference, substitution/ellipsis and lexical cohesion. While they
can be differentiated in their prototypical lexico-grammatical realizations and
semantic functionalities, the available textual evidence shows them to be related
on a number of dimensions. We shall then turn to a systemic overview of nominal,
verbal and clausal substitution mechanisms and complement it by some textual
findings. Finally we shall raise some questions to do with a general comparison of
English and German substitution, how it relates to generalizations of contrastive
grammar, and what some explanations may be of the observations made here.- For a more comprehensive discussion, see Kunz and Steiner (2012) and Steiner
(forthcoming).