THE APPLICABILITY OF LINGUISTIC POLITENESS TO TRANSLATION: A CASE STUDY

Rosa Lorés Sanz

The present paper picks up on some aspects of a complex attempt to approach politeness studies from a new angle: translation. The most relevant approaches to the study of politeness agree on its two-sided character, which entails, on the one hand, linguistic meaning and, on the other, social meaning. This twofold concept of politeness determines the close relationship between its linguistic expression and the cultural context within which such expression is used. The cultural-relativistic stand that this assumption implies in some ways contradicts or, at least, partly questions, the universal character ascribed to linguistic politeness by one of the seminal theories in the field: the framework of Politeness theory devised by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson in their book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1978, 1987). In my view, politeness theory and the discussion about what is universal and what is culturally-determined in politeness can benefit from contrastive studies in the field of translation, and translation can also profit from insights into the study of linguistic politeness, as it is my intention to illustrate here with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and La gata sobre el tejado de zinc caliente as corpora.

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BEYOND CODING AND CONTROL: LEAKAGE, CATEGORIZATION AND BLOCKING IN THE DEFINITION OF THE ENGLISH SUBJECT

Javier Martín Arista

This paper offers a non-intuitive definition of the English subject by discussing Keenan´s coding and control properties and by contending that leakage, blocking properties (co-referentiality, omission of the relative and question target) and categorization must also be taken into account in the definition of this grammatical function. The consideration of leakage and blocking properties allows for a cross-theoretical approach to this syntactic phenomenon that may modify Keenan´s hierarchy of subject properties and the hierarchy of syntactic functions of Keenan and Comrie.

 

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SOME INSIGHTS INTO THE TEACHING OF TRANSLATION

Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez

In the last few years, great attention has been paid to the field of translation. In fact, Translation Studies has been fully established as a discipline in its own right. However, professionals in translation have not been overly concerned with the actual teaching of translation. The didactics of this discipline has mainly consisted in the mechanical manipulation of  a variety of texts, together with boring grammar practice. In most cases a structural and/or a contrastive approach has been adopted and translation as an act of communication and a cognitive process has been almost disregarded. Consequently, the results obtained and the areas covered are relatively limited. This paper starts first by considering the nature of translation  and its role in the Spanish educational system and then goes on to present and describe in detail a series of activities, which have already been tried out with a group of first year English Philology students, as simple examples of creative translation teaching.

 

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THE PASSIVE AS STYLE MARKER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH: EVIDENCE FROM THE HELSINKI CORPUS

Elena Seoane Posse

This paper offers a description of the stylistic dimension of the passive in the Early Modern English period as represented in the computerised Helsinki Corpus of English Texts. The first section examines the stylistic factors which determine the choice of a passive over an active clause. In the second section, EModE be-passives are analysed to discover the reasons for the association between passive constructions and formal styles in that period. Statistical data drawn from the corpus reveal that in EModE the correlation between the passive voice and formal registers is not primarily due to the requirement of impersonality, as is claimed for Present-day English, and that other factors also condition the preference for passives in formal registers of English.

 

 

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Elisa Vázquez Iglesias

Much work has been done lately on the acquisition of English reflexives by L2 learners (cf. Matsumura [1994], Bennet [1996] or Wakabayashi [1996], among others). The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to examine an experiment that has been carried out with Spanish learners of English and, second, to show how imprecise the conclusions that we may reach from this type of experiments are. Thus, while previous work on Japanese and Serbo-Croatian seems to indicate that Second Language Acquisition is systematic and, further, that Universal Grammar is available in acqusition, I suggest that the results obtained in the experiment reported in this paper lead to the opposite claims.

 

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THEME-ANTICS AND THE THE-EERIE CLASS: CRWIT(T)ICISM IN WRAP

David Walton

Rather than an abstract, I shall offer an abstruct or obstract: something which could be said to stand in the way rather than lighten it. Yet, I would have it  retain something of the abstract?an incorporeal substance (a hal[l]o) floating above what lies below. What is it that lies below? Any attempt to describe what happens there in a language which gestures towards an unambiguous style, clarity of argument, neat concision etc. would militate against my tendency to de-scribe. I would say that this is not so much an article but an "art-tickle." Here, then, a ludic cycle, pedalgogical joy-ride into the uncommon, unorthodox terror-tory of liteRAREry theory, via vary-us forms of song (rap, punk, blues): an attempt to Sir-jest (with a modicrumb of wit) an alter-native means of intro-juicing concepts. But at a cost. This is to be done in a lang-wage (O mischievous sprite!) that imp-lies, through its very shApe, the condition of the linguistic sign (post Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva & Cº), witch may be useful in itself, as a kind of exemplum to the way theory may be presented or written about. So, I offer a few comments on motorvation. And to finish, there are "A Few RidDling Quest-ions for the feary glass" and a "Vermiform Appendix" of other possibilities.

 

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