Domande bertucelli 2, esame PDF

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2 – tipologia Languages have many differences, but also they have many commonalities. They differ because languages are dynamic systems and they change over time. They also share many commonalities because there are common functions of the languages. All languages are equal, all languages are different. At some deep level of analysis all languages must share some properties, differences being only on the surface. The main reason is because languages are used for communication by humans beings. This means that it is possible to find out co-properties of languages which make all languages comparable simply because they are produced by human beings to be used by human beings. Universal languages are statements of what is possible and impossible in language: some characteristics are found in all languages, whereas others are found in no language at all. There are at least to different approach to study universal of languages: quantitative approach and qualitative approach. Universals are formulated implicationally: « if language L has x, then it also Language typology: language typology is the field of inquiry that focuses on classifying languages according to their structural characteristics. Language typology make two major presuppositions: languages can be compared with one another in terms of their structure; there are differences among languages but language typology studies the range of possible variations and the constraints on the variations. For language typology any structural property of a language can be chosen as the basis, but in practice it chooses the ones from which other properties can be predicted. Principali differenze tipologiche: tipologia morfologica (isolating-inflectional), word order typology, grammatical morphology (case, gender, number/persone, subjunctive/indicative), prodrop language, semantic diversity of grammatical relations/raising e extraction, verbi di movimento (satellite/verb-framed). The first important typological classification of languages dates back to the research of August Wilhelm Schlegel. He studies the ways in which individual morphemes combine into words (morphological typology) who identified three main types of languages: isolating languages, agglutinating languages, inflectional languages. Isolating languages: no inflectional and derivational morphology; these languages use separate words to express grammatical categories such as plural. Agglutinating languages: complex words with several prefixes and suffixes and each morpheme corresponds to a single grammatical function or lexical meaning. Inflectional languages: the form of a word changes to show a change in meaning or grammatical function. Example: amo/ami/amiamo Individual languages are never entirely of one type. English is predominantly isolating but it also has agglutination and some inflection. Italian is predominantly flectional with some agglutination and some isolating features.

Word order typology: Greenberg examined a number of logically independent word order parameters, including the order of subject, verb, and object in the simple declarative sentence; he identified 6 possible types: VSO, SVO, SOV, VOS, OSV, OVS. English is one of the most rigid SVO languages. Italian is a (S)VO language because subjects sometimes can be drop. Contrastive typology GRAMMATICAL morphology: : Italian has richer inflectional morphology than English. Numerous grammatical distinctions that are made in Italian inflectional morphology are not made in English. Differences: Italian has three cases, English has two; the gender is marked on all (pro)nominal and adjectival categories in Italian, only on pronominal ones in English (he/she/it); Italian has subjunctive and indicative, English has a predominant one; Italian verbs carry person and number markings; English uses the same form except for 3rd person singular for both imperative and non-imperative forms. Other important differences concern the fact that verb phrases in English and Italian differ for the construction. Italian is a pro-drop language, that means that in certain contexts you can omit the subject. Be a pro-drop language also implies that if you express the subject before the verb, you may get a natural translation. Italian-English: Italian has a more grammatical morphology, more word order freedom, and less semantic diversity of grammatical relations. On the contrary, English has less grammatical morphology, less word order freedom, but more semantic diversity of grammatical relations. These features produce a greater ambiguity in English. Italian has less raising and less extraction, while English has more raising, more extraction. Raising: an element which is generated in a basic position gets a raised to another position. In English raising is unbounded, while in Italian it is bounded, you cannot raise an object to subjects if the structure is more complex. Extraction: extraction out of an infinitival object complement of a two-place predicate Verbs of motion: English and Italian differ concerning the lexicalization in verbs of motion. English is a satellite-framed language, because English verbs usually show manner of motion and use particles to show the path of motion. Italian is a verb-framed language because it directly encodes motion path, and may leave out the manner of motion or express it in a complement of manner.

Complex adapted system paradigm: Complex (or adaptive/dynamic ) systems are selforganising systems, consisting of many different parts which interact in a non-linear manner. They are adaptive in nature and are shaped by multiple interactions between many different components over time. Therefore, they are dynamic by definition. Their behaviours emerge from interactions.

The main phonological asymmetries concern the quantity and quality of consonants and vowels.

As for the consonants, English and Italian differ both in terms of the type and number of phonemes they have, and in terms of their allophones. English has phonemes that Italian does not have: /θ/ /ð/ /h/ /ŋ/ /ž/. Italian has phonemes that English does not have: /ts/ /dz/ / ɲ/ /λ/. Furthermore, Italian has a rhotic pronunciation, while English has a non rhotic pronunciation. In English /h/ is a phoneme but not in Italian. English has a higher number of allophones that Italian. As to the vowels, the major differences concern the place of articulation (English vowels does not overlap with the Italian) and length, which is phonological in English but not in Italian.

English inflectional morphology is very poor. On the contrary Italian has a rich morphology. The major difficulties in translations are: compulsory presence in English vs. conditional optionality in Italian of the subject pronoun (Italian is a pro-drop language); the choice of pronoun depends on the register; different uses of the possessive for pronouns; clitics vs. strong pronouns; different use of articles, especially definite articles, which also testify to different ways of expressing definiteness. Articoli: The translation of articles is one of the most critical areas in the translation from English to Italian. There is a strong asymmetry in the uses of articles because Italian has 7 definite articles while English has only 'the'; Italian has 4 forms of indefinite articles while English has only a/an. Indefinite articles: English has a much more widespread use of indefinites because English makes a distinction between countable and uncountable, which is not made in Italian; the latter cannot have the definite article so they often have the indefinite. English always puts the indefinite article before a noun of profession, while Italian uses the definite article. Definite articles: English does not use the article in front of abstract nouns, generic nouns, uncountable unless there is a specification. In Italian nouns referring to totality are generally preceded by the definite article, while in English they have the zero article. Italian places the definite article before body parts when they are referred to as unique entities. English generally uses the possessive adjective. Articoli det plurali: A particular problem can be represented in the translation from English into Italian by the article 0 in front of plurals. English plurals, and in particular generic plurals, do not want the definite article; in Italian the options may be different: it may be omitted, a definite article can be used, in other cases an indefinite article. It is necessary to evaluate each time which is the most appropriate choice in order not to generate ambiguity. Principali asimmetrie ingl-ita nella morfologia: the main asymmetries between English and Italian in the area of morphology concern inflection and reduplication. In fact, English does not have a rich morphological inflection system like Italian because it is not an inflectional language. English must therefore try to interpret the meanings contained in Italian affixes and express them through adjectives. However, English has reduplicatives, which are very difficult to render in Italian.

Morfopragmatica: Morphopragmatics was developed as a theory by Wolfgang Dressler in 1994, in which the author starts from the assumption that there is no priority of denotative semantic meaning over pragmatic meaning, but from the fact that "morphology is capable of a direct interface with pragmatics, not mediated through its semantics. The primary phenomena that fall under this branch of morphology are all evaluative affixes (mainly suffixes), and vexatious affixes whose effects are felt beyond the word base and extend to the whole linguistic act. The first view of equivalence was provided by Nida in 1969. He indicates two different kind of equivalence:  

Formal equivalence: focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content. Dynamic equivalence: based on the principle of equivalent effect, so that the relationship between receiver and message should aim at being the same as that between the original receivers and the SL language.

According to this theory, the equivalent effect is based on the “four basic requirements of a translation”: 1. making sense 2. conveying the spirit and manner of the original 3. having a natural and easy form of expression 4. producing a similar response. The second view of equivalence was provided by Newmark in 1988. He re-elaborates the distinction between formal and dynamic translation and calls them:  

Communicative translation: attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original (Nida’s dynamic equivalence). Semantic translation: attempts to render, as closely as the semantic and syntactic structures of the second language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original (Nida’s formal equivalence).

The third was elaborated by Koller in 1979. He introduces the concept of correspondence, linked with the concept of equivalence:  

Correspondence: phenomena and conditions, describing corresponding structures and sentences in the TL and SL systems. Foreign languages competence, Saussure’s langue. Equivalence: phenomena, describing hierarchy of utterances and texts in SL and TL according to the equivalence criterion. Translation competence, Saussure’s parole.

He distinguishes five types of equivalence:

    

Denotative equivalence: related to the extralinguistic content of a text (“content invariance”) Connotative equivalence: related to the lexical choices, especially between near synonyms (“stylistic equivalence”) Text-normative equivalence: related to text types (conventional expressions for example “having regard to”, translated with “visto”). Pragmatic/ communicative equivalence: oriented towards the receiver of the text or message Formal equivalence: related to the form and aesthetics of the text, includes word plays and the individual stylistic features of the ST (“expressive equivalence”) The major phonological asymmetries concern the quality and the quantity of consonants and vocals. For what concerns the consonants, English has phonemes that Italian does not have and Italian has phonemes that English does not have (English: /ð/, /h/, /ž/, /θ/, /ŋ/; Italian: /ts/, /dz/, /ʎ/, /ɲ/; they exhibit different pronunciations of /r/ (rhoticnon rhotic): /h/ is a phoneme in English but not in Italian, and finally there are differences in the number and type of allophones. Referring to the vowels, the mayor differences concern length- which is phonological in English, but not in Italian; then, there is the fact that the place of articulation of English vowels does not overlap with the Italian. These asymmetries have an important impact on translation, involving difficulties in the rendering of alliteration, rhymes, phonetic effects, especially in those domains where the phonetic texture of the text in significant (literature, poetry, nursery rhymes, advertisements).

Evidentiality is the phenomenon represented by the expressions Allegedly and it has been reported because these forms articulate the idea that the speaker does not have direct knowledge (but derives it from other information or has evidence or deduces it); evidentiality includes any kind of evidence of a perceptual or cognitive kind that a certain subject has about the state of affairs. Its most frequent linguistic expressions are: I hear that, I see that, as I hear, as I can see, as far as I understand, they say, it is said, it seems, it looks like, it appears that, it turns out that, alleged, stated, allegedly, reportedly and the use of conditional. Reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. Ex. Willy-nilly. There are three types of reduplication: 

Apophonic: exhibiting vowel apophony that is a systematic alternation of the stressed vowel as in chit-chat, dilly-dally (che la tira per le lunghe), fiddle-faddle (gingillone), flip-flop.

 

rhymed reduplicatives (reduplicativi rimati): exhibiting rhyming constituents and change of the initial consonant as in fuzzy-wuzzy (sciattone), hotsy-totsy (perfettina), hurly-burly, roly-poly (pacioccone). Rhyming compounds: in which both bases are meaningful, for ex. argy/bargy (disputare), artsy-craftsy (artistoidi), creepie-peepie (telecamerina nascosta...