Cover not available
Part of
Focus on Additivity: Adverbial modifiers in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages
Edited by Anna-Maria De Cesare and Cecilia Andorno
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 278] 2017
► pp. 157–200

Chapter 6
Mapping additivity through translation

From French aussi to Italian anche and back in the Europarl-direct corpus

| Università di Torino
| Universität Basel

Many languages have an overabundant set of additive focus adverbs (AFAs), whose differences are mostly investigated in semantic (e.g. scalarity) or syntactic (scope phenomena and restrictions for specific domains of association) terms. The present study adopts a discourse perspective on the issue, comparing two cross-linguistic, near-equivalent AFAs (Italian anche and French aussi) in original texts and their translations in the Europarl corpus. Specifically, this study describes the relation established between the constituent in the scope of the AFA and its alternatives, which can be either co-textually available or contextually inferable. Comparing the frequencies of anche and aussi in original texts and taking into account their translation equivalents confirms important differences between these adverbs. While aussi is more restricted to the syntagmatic function of linking co-textually available alternatives in adjacent sentences, anche appears in a wider array of uses, including cases in which the identification of alternatives requires more complex inferential steps, as they are distant or even implicit to the domain of association.

Keywords: French, Italian, additive focus adverbs, alternatives, paradigmatic relations, syntagmatic relations, translation equivalent, Europarl corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Additive focus adverbs: semantic, syntactic and discourse properties
    • 2.1 Setting defining parameters in the description of AFAs: domain of association, scope and alternatives
    • 2.2Semantic classification of AFAs in French and Italian
      • 2.2.1Polarity and scalarity
      • 2.2.2 Semantic properties of Fr. aussi and It. anche
    • 2.3The role of alternatives in the use of AFAs
  • 3.Comparing AFAs in discourse
    • 3.1Mapping AFAs discourse functions through translation equivalents
    • 3.2Europarl as a parallel corpus
    • 3.3 The selected directional corpora: French aussi > Italian and Italian anche > French
      • 3.3.1Tables of translation paradigms
      • 3.3.2Translation divergences
  • 4. Mapping additivity of aussi and anche in the Europarl-direct corpus
    • 4.1Parameters for the analysis: Availability of alternatives and set of alternatives
      • 4.1.1Co-textually available alternatives
      • 4.1.2Co-textually non-available alternatives
    • 4.2 Results of the analysis: aussi and anche in source texts and translations
      • 4.2.1 Aussi and anche in source texts: overview
      • 4.2.2 Cross-linguistic differences in source texts and translation paradigms of aussi/anche with co-textually available alternatives
        • 4.2.2.1Source texts.
        • 4.2.2.2Translation paradigms.
      • 4.2.3 Cross-linguistic differences in source texts and translation paradigms of aussi/anche with co-textually non-available alternatives
        • 4.2.3.1Source texts.
        • 4.2.3.2Translation paradigms.
    • 4.3Mapping the discourse functions of aussi/anche in the Europarl-direct corpus
      • 4.3.1 Aussi/Anche as syntagmatic AFAs
      • 4.3.2 Aussi/Anche as paradigmatic AFAs
  • 5.Final remarks and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.278.06and
References
Amsili, Pascal, and Grégoire Winterstein
2012 “Les déclencheurs de présupposition additifs”. Langages 186/2: 85–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Andorno, Cecilia
1999 “Avverbi focalizzanti in italiano. Parametri per un’analisi”. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata 28/1: 43–83.Google Scholar
2000 Focalizzatori fra connessione e messa a fuoco. Il punto di vista delle varietà di apprendimento. Milano: Angeli.Google Scholar
2005 “Additive and restrictive particles in Italian as a second language. Embedding in the verbal utterance structure”. In The Structure of Learner Varieties, ed. by Henriëtte Hendriks, 405–444. Berlin-New York: de Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 “Ancora su anche, anche su ancora. Per uno studio comparativo dell’apprendimento e della gestione di strategie coesive in IL”. In Diachronica et Synchronica. Studi in onore di Anna Giacalone Ramat, ed. by Romano Lazzeroni, Emanuele Banfi, Giuliano Bernini, Marina Chini, and Giovanna Marotta, 29–52. Pisa: Edizioni ETS.Google Scholar
Andorno, Cecilia, and Giuseppina Turco
2015 “Embedding additive particles in the sentence information structure: How L2 learners find their way through positional and prosodic patterns”. In Focus Particles in the Romance and Germanic Languages. Corpus-based and Experimental Approaches, ed. by Anna-Maria De Cesare, and Cecilia Andorno, 57–79 [ Linguistik Online 71/2].Google Scholar
Bazzanella, Carla
1995 “I segnali discorsivi”. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, ed. by Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi, and Anna Cardinaletti, vol. 3, 225–257. Bologna: il Mulino.Google Scholar
2006 “Discourse Markers in Italian: Towards a ‘compositional’ meaning”. In Approaches to Discourse Particles, ed. by Kerstin Fischer, 449–464. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Benazzo, Sandra, and Cecilia Andorno
2010 “Discourse cohesion and Topic discontinuity in native and learner production: Changing topic entities on maintained predicates”. In EUROSLA Yearbook 10/1, ed. by Leah Roberts, Martin Howard, Muiris Ó Laoire, and David Singleton, 92–118. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas
1994 “Representativeness in corpus design”. In Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: in Honour of Don Walker, ed. by Antonio Zampolli, Nicoletta Calzolari, and Martha Palmer, 377–407. Pisa: Giardini. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blumenthal, Peter
1985 “Aussi et auch: deux faux amis?” Französisch Heute 2: 144–150.Google Scholar
Borreguero Zuloaga, Margarita
2011 “Focalizzatori a confronto: anche vs también”. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata XL/3: 441–468.Google Scholar
Brianti, Giovanna
2014 “Cleft sentences. A translation perspective on Italian and French”. In Frequency, Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and Germanic. Contrastive, Corpus-based Studies, ed. by Anna-Maria De Cesare, 277–321. Berlin-New York: de Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Caffi, Claudia
1999 “On mitigation”. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 881–909. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cartoni, Bruno, Sandrine Zufferey, and Thomas Meyer
2013 “Using the Europarl corpus for cross-linguistic research”. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 27: 23–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria
2010 “On the focusing function of focusing adverbs. A discussion based on Italian data”. In 40 Jahre Partikelforschung/40 Years Particle Research, ed. by Elke Hentschel, 99–116 [ Linguistik Online 44/4].Google Scholar
2015a “Additive particles in canonical word orders: A cross-linguistic, corpus-based study on Italian anche, French aussi and English also”. In Focus Particles in the Romance and Germanic Languages. Corpus-based and Experimental Approaches, ed. by Anna-Maria De Cesare, and Cecilia Andorno, 31–56. [ Linguistik online 71/2].Google Scholar
2015b “Defining Focusing Modifiers in a cross-linguistic perspective. A discussion based on English, German, French and Italian”. In Adverbs – Functional and Diachronic Aspects, ed. by Karin Pittner, Daniela Elsner, and Fabian Barteld, 47–81. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins [Studies in Language Companion Series]. DOI logo Google Scholar
2017 Per un altro tassello dell’italiano come lingua (debolmente) bicentrica l’uso di pure e neppure nell’italiano giornalistico d’Italia e della Svizzera italiana. In Linguisti in contatto 2. Ricerche di linguistica italiana in Svizzera. Atti del convegno dell’Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana (Bellinzona, 16–17 novembre 2007), ed. by Bruno Moretti, Elena M. Pandolfi, Sabine Christopher, and Matteo Casoni, 146–159. Bellinzona: Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana.Google Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria, and Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga
2014 “The contribution of the Basel Model to the description of polyfunctional discourse markers. The case of It. anche, Fr. aussi and Sp. también”. In Discourse Segmentation in Romance Languages, ed. by Salvador Pons Bordería, 55–94. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins [ Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, vol 250]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria, and Davide Garassino, Rocío Agar Marco, Laura Baranzini
2014 “Form and frequency of Italian cleft constructions in a corpus of electronic news. A comparative perspective with French, Spanish, German and English”. In Frequency, Forms and Functions of Cleft Constructions in Romance and Germanic. Contrastive, Corpus-based Studies, ed. by Anna-Maria De Cesare, 49–99. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton [ Trends in Linguistics 281].Google Scholar
De Cesare, Anna-Maria, and Davide Garassino, Rocío Agar Marco, Ana Albom, Doriana Cimmino
2016 Sintassi marcata dell’italiano dell’uso medio in prospettiva contrastiva con il francese, lo spagnolo, il tedesco e l’inglese. Uno studio basato sulla scrittura dei quotidiani online. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dimroth, Christine, and Wolfgang Klein
1996 “Fokuspartikeln in Lernervarietäten. Ein Analyserahmen und einige Beispiele”. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 104: 73–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dimroth, Christine, Cecilia Andorno, Sandra Benazzo, and Josie Verhagen
2010 “Given claims about new topics. How Romance and Germanic speakers link changed and maintained information in narrative discourse”. Journal of Pragmatics 42/12: 3328–3344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
EAGLES
1996 Preliminary recommendations on Corpus Typology. [URL] (accessed in May 2016).
Ferrari, Angela, Luca Cignetti, Anna-Maria De Cesare, Letizia Lala, Magda Mandelli, Claudia Ricci, and Carlo Enrico Roggia
2008 L’interfaccia lingua-testo. Natura e funzioni dell’articolazione informativa dell’enunciato. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.Google Scholar
Ferrari, Angela
(ed.) 2004 La lingua nel testo, il testo nella lingua. Torino: Istituto dell’atlante linguistico italiano.Google Scholar
Fjelkestam-Nilsson, Brita
1983 ‘Also’ and ‘too’. A Corpus-based Study on their Frequency and Use in Modern English. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.Google Scholar
Gast, Volker
2006 “The distribution of also and too – a preliminary corpus study”. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54/2: 163–176. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, François
1989 “Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person”. Brain Language 36/1: 3–15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hummel, Martin
2013 “Attribution in Romance: Reconstructing the oral and written tradition”. Folia Linguistica Historica 34: 1–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jarvis, Scott, and Aneta Pavlenko
2008 Cross-linguistic Influence in Language and Cognition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johansson, Stig
2007 Seeing through Multilingual Corpora. On the Use of Corpora in Contrastive Studies. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koehn, Philipp
2005 “Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation”. Phuket. MT Summit X.Google Scholar
König, Ekkehard
1991 The Meaning of Focus Particles: A Comparative Perspective. London-New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lauwers, Peter
2003 “Aussi vs. ook. Une étude contrastive de deux ‘faux-amis’”. Preprint 201, KU Leuven: Dept. Linguistiek.Google Scholar
2006 “Aussi vs. ook. Une analyse contrastive de deux adverbes polyfonctionnels”. In Studies in Contrastive Linguistics. Proceedings of the 4th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (Santiago de Compostela, September 2005), ed. by Cristina Mourón Figueroa, and Teresa Iciar Moralejo Gárate, 479–491. Santiago de Compostela, Universidade: Servizo de Publicacións e Intercambio Científico.Google Scholar
Laviosa, Sara
2002 Corpus-based Translation Studies. Theory, Findings, Applications. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Longobardi, Giuseppe
1988 “I quantificatori”. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, ed. by Lorenzo Renzi, vol. 1, 645–698. Bologna: il Mulino.Google Scholar
Mari, Alda, and Lucia Tovena
2006 “A unified account for the additive and the scalar uses of Italian neppure”. In New Perspectives on Romance Linguistics: Vol. I: Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatic, ed. by Nishida Chiyo, and Jean-Pierre Y. Montreuil, 187–200. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Molinier, Christian, and Françoise Lévrier
2000 Grammaire des adverbes. Description des formes en -ment. Genève-Paris: Droz.Google Scholar
Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt, and Corinne Rossari
2005 “The evolution of pragmatic markers: Introduction”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6/2: 177–187. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nølke, Henning
1983 Les adverbes paradigmatisants: Fonction et analyse. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.Google Scholar
Olohan, Maeve
2004 Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. London-New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Perrin-Naffakh, Anne-Marie
1996 “Aussi adjonctif: de la syntaxe à la sémantique”. Le Français Moderne 64/2: 136–154.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Ricca, Davide
1999 “Osservazioni preliminari sui focalizzatori in italiano”. In Grammatica e discorso. Studi sull’acquisizione dell’italiano e del tedesco, ed. by Norbert Dittmar, and Anna Giacalone Ramat, 146–164. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.Google Scholar
Rooth, Mats
1992 “A theory of focus interpretation”. Natural Language Semantics 1: 75–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sbisà, Marina
2001 “Illocutionary force and degrees of strength in language use”. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 1791–1814. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwenter, Scott
2001 “Additive particles and the construction of context”. In La pragmática de los conectores y las partículas modales, ed. by Hang Ferrer, and Salvador Pons Bordería, 245–262. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia [ Quaderns de Filología. Estudis Linguistics VI].Google Scholar
Taglicht, Josef
1984 Message and Emphasis. On Focus and Scope in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

De Cesare, Anna-Maria
2022. To be or not to be focus adverbials?. In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 204 ff. DOI logo
De Cesare, Anna-Maria
2022. Répétitions et variations des textes générés. CHIMERA: Revista de Corpus de Lenguas Romances y Estudios Lingüísticos 8 ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo
Reimer, Laura & Christine Dimroth
2022. Unstressed versus stressed German additive auch – what determines a speaker’s choice?. Linguistics Vanguard 8:1 ► pp. 177 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.