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The discursive construction дело в том, что and its parallels in other languages: A contrastive corpus study
Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies, Finnish, Dutch, and German.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4983-4607
2016 (English)In: Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies: Proceedings of the International Conference "Dialogue" (2016) / [ed] V. P. Selegey, A. V. Baytin, V. I. Belikov, I. M. Boguslavsky, B. V. Dobrov, D. O. Dobrovol’skij, L. L. Iomdin, E. Hovy, I. M. Kobozeva, E. B. Kozerenko, M. A. Krongauz, N. I. Laufer, N. V. Loukachevich, D. McCarthy, P. Nakov, J. Nivre, G. S. Osipov, A. Ch. Piperski, V. Raskin, S.A. Sharoff, T. E. Yanko, L. M. Zakharov, Moscow: RSUH , 2016, p. 134-145Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

The primary goal of the present study is to improve methods for contras-tive corpus investigations. Our data is the Russian construction дело в том, что and its parallels in English, German and Swedish. This construction, which appears to present no difficulty for translation into other languages, is in fact language-specific with respect to at least one parameter. It dis-plays a large number of different parallels (translation equivalents) in other languages, and possesses a complex semantic structure. The configura-tion of semantic elements comprising the content plane of this construction is unique. The empirical data have been collected from the corpus query system Sketch Engine, subcorpus OPUS2 Russian, and the Russian Na-tional Corpus (RNC). The analysis shows that the construction дело в том, что has more than 50 parallels in English, over 30 in German, and about 30 in Swedish. In all three languages the most common means of translat-ing the construction is to omit it. Also frequent are the English equivalents the fact/thing/point/truth is (that); (it’s/this/that is) because; the German expressions nämlich; die Sache ist, die; denn; and the Swedish construc-tions saken är den att; problemet/faktum är att. The semantic structure of дело в том, что includes the following components: 1) substantiation of something stated previously; 2) indication of the reason something has happened; 3) emphasis on the significance of what has been stated. The different translations of the construction are motivated by the fact that each specific context focuses on one of these meanings.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Moscow: RSUH , 2016. p. 134-145
Series
Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies, ISSN 2221-7932 ; 15
Keywords [en]
parallel corpus, construction, contrastive corpus analysis, Russian, English, German, Swedish, language specificity, semantics
National Category
Languages and Literature
Research subject
Linguistics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-132982OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-132982DiVA, id: diva2:955969
Conference
The International Conference "Dialogue 2016", Moscow, Russia, June 1–4, 2016
Available from: 2016-08-28 Created: 2016-08-28 Last updated: 2022-02-23Bibliographically approved

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Dobrovolskij, DmitrijPöppel, Ludmila

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CiteExportLink to record
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