clause combining across languages: a corpus-based study of english-french translation shifts

christelle cosme.

This study uses bilingual corpora to test “the claim that English shows a strong preference for coordination while French makes more extensive use of subordination” (71). The results support this claim.
This article has two primary goals: “(a) gain more insight into the contrast between English and French in terms of clause-combining; (b) shed more light on clause combining in general – and, more particularly, on the relationship between coordination and subordination” (72). The article also has two secondary goals: (a) demonstrate how “corpus linguistics can serve the needs of syntactic cross-linguistic research” and (b) encourage language teachers to introduce translation corpora as a teaching tool (95-99).

Syntactical Background Information
There are three types of interclausal relations (73-74).
Juxtaposition He ate too much for dinner; he was ill the next day. Parataxis: establishes equivalent relation between clauses
Coordination He ate too much for dinner and (he) was ill the next day. Parataxis
Subordination Because he ate too much for dinner, he was ill the next day. Hypotaxis: establishes hierarchical relation between clauses

“No clear borderline seems to exist between coordination and subordination.”
The claim is that English prefers coordination, while French prefers subordination (76, example 8).

Methodology

Cosme used both monolingual and translation corpora for this study, analyzing two registers: fiction and journalese (78-79).


Monolingual corpus results

“Interclausal and is significantly more frequent than interclausal et” in fiction; this difference is not observed in journalese (80-81).

French is more apt to coordinate full clauses than English, which is more likely to coordinate predicates by ellipting the subject in the second clause (82).

Coordinating conjunctions convey two separate meanings: the static meaning (pure addition) or dynamic meaning (temporal sequence or consequence). In journalese, French tends to use et to convey a static meaning more often than English, which tends to use and to convey a dynamic meaning (83-84).


Translation corpus results

“It is more common for inter-clausal and to be translated by something else other than inter-clausal et ( . . .) than vice-versa” (84). This occurs in both fiction and journalese (85).

In the majority of examples, translators have the option of either coordinating or subordinating: the change is not obligatory (86).

Translations from English to French shift to subordinating structures by use of the following:
• Participle clause (28.3%)
• Purpose clause
• Relative clause (23.9%)
French-to-English translations display the following shift strategies:
• Participle clause (41.2%)