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

本项目涉及表示条件关系、因果关系或让步关系的连接词，如‘if’、‘season’和‘While’。它利用一个双峰翻译语料库(EPTIC-J)来研究相关连接词在20种欧洲国家语言中的使用和分布情况。EPTIC-J语料库包含欧洲议会发言的文字记录及其同声传译和欧洲联盟其他语言的书面翻译。这个语料库的设计使我们能够研究连接词在原始语言中的分布，以及在(离线/书面以及同时/口头)翻译中反映的跨语言对应。偶然性连接词在解释上是多层次的，因为它们具有以真值为条件的解释，同时也在语篇层面和论证层面上触发交际效果。主要的问题是：(I)不同解释层面的意义如何映射到语言形式(从属词的分布和从句的线性顺序)，以及(Ii)特定连接词及其所表达的关系与认知负荷的程度如何。我们只使用语料库的书面部分来回答问题(I)。对于问题(Ii)，我们依赖口译数据，使用口译中的翻译选择和耳-音跨度值(EVS/décalage)作为认知负荷的指标。通过采用一种新的方法(双峰比较语料库分析)来研究一个从不同角度(类型学、句子语义、语篇/对话和论证)进行调查的专题，并将口头数据结合到图片中，该项目打算以新的视角重新考虑现有的主张和概括，并开辟新的视角。

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.