Tertia comparationis in multilingual corpora 21
in the figure, which would actually be much smaller in a figure drawn to scale, is
occupied by non-prepositional encodings of ‘betweenness’, to which we turn in
the next section.
BetweennessDans In
à traversThroughAu millieu de
Among ParmiAmongstBetween EntreFigure 4. The prepositions most commonly used to code ‘betweenness’
in English and French
4.3 Tokens translated by divergent constructions
We saw in Section 4.2 that predications of non-spatial ‘betweenness’ are hardly
ever encoded by prepositions other than between in English and entre in French.
It is, however, in these sorts of predications that we find the greatest percentage
of divergent constructions. Table 4 contains figures for divergent encodings of all
the senses, with percentages in the case of senses that employ non-prepositional
constructions in more than 20% of all instances.
Table 4. Tokens of mellom translated by divergent constructions
Type Total tokens English French English + French
Location 139 9 20 2
Motion 89 1 3 0
Interaction 51 5 14 27% 2
Relationship 47 3 12 26% 1
Comparison 36 1 13 36% 0
Idiom 14 6 43% 6 43% 5 36%
Time 17 2 3 1
Total 393 27 7% 76 19% 16 4%