Tertia comparationis in multilingual corpora 23
- Summary and conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated that there is a considerable degree of similarity
between English and French in their encoding of ‘betweenness’. Any differences
between the two languages in their encodings of the various sub-senses are statisti-
cally non-significant. There is a considerable overlap (56%) between the two lan-
guages in their use of the default prepositions between and entre. Both languages
employ alternative prepositions to encode spatial ‘betweenness’, but hardly at all
for other senses, while French employs non-prepositional constructions to encode
‘betweenness’ to a greater extent than English, especially in non-spatial senses.
We have also seen that the 3-text approach employed in this study allows us to
stipulate the degree of resemblance between the two languages in a way that 2-text
approaches cannot. Employing texts in a third language as tertia comparationis
also allows us to bypass the knotty question of what exactly is being compared.
Further research should take the form of comparing translations of ‘betweenness’
into English and French from a language other than Norwegian. It would be an
advantage, especially for the study of the Motion tokens, if this other language
were a verb-framed one like French rather than a satellite-framed one like English
(see Talmy 2000: 222 for the distinction). We must, of course, await the results of
such studies employing other multilingual corpora, before we can reach a conclu-
sion about the validity of the conclusions in this chapter.
References
Corpora
The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus: see http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/
enpc/
The Oslo Multilingual Corpus: see http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/
Secondary sources
Cappelle, B. 2011. Show me your translation and I’ll show you what source language it comes
from: Motion verbs in English translated from French vs. German. Paper at the Societas
Linguistica Europaea 44th annual meeting in Logroño, 8–11 September 2011.
Egan, T. In press. Between and through revisited. VARIENG: Studies in Variation, Contacts and
Change in English.
Hickmann, M. & Robert, S. 2006. Space, language, and cognition: Some new challenges. In Space
in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories [Typological Studies in Language
66], M. Hickmann & S. Robert (eds), 1–17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.