Bimodal corpus-based language comparison. A study of connectives of contigency in European languages

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Volker Gast
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 518005590

This project deals with connectives that express a conditional, causal or concessive relation, such as `if', `because' and `although'. It makes use of a bimodal translation corpus (EPTIC-J) to study the use and distribution of relevant connectives in twenty European national languages. The EPTIC-J corpus contains transcriptions of speeches made in the European Parliament as well as their simultaneous interpretations and written translations into the other languages of the European Union. This corpus design allows us to study connectives in terms of their distributions in original language as well as crosslinguistic correspondences reflected in (offline/written as well as simultaneous/spoken) translation. Connectives of contingency are interpretively multi-layered, insofar as they have a truth-conditional interpretation while also triggering communicative effects at the discourse level and the level of argumentation. The main questions addressed are (i) how aspects of meaning at various levels of interpretation map to linguistic form (distribution of subordinators and linear order of clauses), and (ii) what degrees of cognitive load are associated with specific connectives and the relations that they express. We address question (i) by using the written part of the corpus only. For question (ii) we rely on the interpreting data, using translation choices in interpreting and ear-voice span values (EVS/décalage) as indicators of cognitive load. By applying a novel methodology (bimodal comparative corpus analysis) to the study of a topic that has been investigated from various perspectives (typology, sentence semantics, discourse/conversation and argumentation), and by integrating spoken data into the picture the project intends to reconsider existing claims and generalizations in a new light as well as open up new perspectives.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants