Peter Jurgec's Erasmus+ Mobility Grant from the EU Commission has allowed for a two-year period of research and teaching exchange. In conjunction with this, we are delighted to welcome two visiting linguists: Robert Grošelj and Tamara Mikolič Južnič, both Assistant Professors in the Department of Translation at the University of Ljubljana. Between them, they will be giving eight talks, as follows. All current departmental members and friends are welcome!
1. Monday, January 20, from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM in OISE 5230: "A contrastive look at linguistic gender categories: Slovene and Italian names of public offices" (Robert Grošelj):
The contrastive lecture on the representation of linguistic gender categories – grammatical, lexical, referential and social gender – in Slovene and Italian will focus on personal nouns denoting selected public offices such as Slovene minister, ministrica ‘minister-male, minister-female’, župan, županja ‘mayor-male, mayor-female’ and the synonymous Italian il ministro, la ministra, il sindaco, la sindaca (sindachessa). Both languages have grammatically and lexically feminine and masculine personal nouns; referential gender of masculine nouns is wider, as they can refer to male, male and/or female referents, in Italian also exclusively to female referents. The agreement is controlled mainly by grammatical (and the corresponding lexical) gender, although in some cases (cf. gender exclusive categories) the agreement can be triggered also by referential gender. The selected public offices could be held by women only in the 1940s; the men are still the predominant holders of these offices (judges being the exception) which indicates their male social gender.
2. Monday, January 20, from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM in OISE 5230: "Connectors in spoken and written discourse in the multimodal corpus EPTIC" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):
With its multimodal and multilingual design, the EPTIC corpus fosters a range of different research perspectives, involving interpreting and translation and different types of comparisons of the different combinations of subcorpora. It consists of original speeches from the European Parliament, their written verbatim reports, their Slovene interpretations and the translations of the verbatim reports. The initial research on EPTIC-SI, the Slovene component of EPTIC, has focused on interpreted discourse in contrast with the corresponding translations and the corresponding source texts. In this lecture, the aim is to expand this research paradigm, by using data from EPTIC-SI and contrasting it with a corpus of spoken Slovene (GOS) and a corpus of written Slovene (KRES), to shed light on the differences between the spoken and the written varieties of Slovene. The aim is to explore the differences in frequency in the two corpora, the differences between interpreted and freely spoken texts and the differences between translations and original texts in the target language.
3. Tuesday, January 21, from 12 PM to 1 PM in the department lounge (with pizza and pop provided): "Nominalization in Italian and Slovene: A systemic functional linguistics view" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):
The lecture focuses on a contrastive analysis of nominalization in Italian and Slovene within the framework of systemic functional grammar as described by M.A.K. Halliday and his colleagues. Nominalization is viewed as a type of grammatical metaphor whereby processes which are congruently realized by verbs are metaphorically realized by nouns expressing the same process as those verbs. The frequency of nominalization varies greatly among languages as well as among genres within a language, and may cause problems when two languages interact, e.g. in translation, especially when one of the two languages seems less prone to use this kind of grammatical metaphor than the other. In the present study, an analysis is carried out of a 2.5 million token parallel corpus of Italian source texts and their Slovene translations, particularly with regard to the different translation equivalents that may appear in the translated texts, which is partly dependent of the type of process involved.
4. Wednesday, January 22, from 12 PM to 1 PM in the department lounge (with pizza and pop provided): "Vojvodina Rusyn language: A short presentation of a South Slavic microlanguage and its phoneme inventory" (Robert Grošelj):
The main aim of the lecture will be the presentation of Vojvodina Rusyn as a specific South Slavic (literary) microlanguage. The introductory part of the lecture will focus on the concept of Slavic (literary) microlanguage, introduced and developed by the Russian-Estonian linguist A. Duličenko; the analysis of the concept will take into account its defining characteristics, geographical classification and sociolinguistic parameters (name, vernacular base, time period of the literary tradition, script, time period of codification, functional status). The following part will be dedicated to the presentation of Vojvodina Rusyn, a South Slavic microlanguage spoken in Vojvodina (Serbia); the analysis will focus on Vojvodina Rusyn history, language system, literary production, standardisation and contemporary sociolinguistic issues. In the last part of the lecture, the Vojvodina Rusyn phoneme inventory will be briefly analysed.
5. Wednesday, January 22, 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM in OISE 5230: "A corpus study of pronominal subjects in translated and non-translated texts" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):
Pronominal subject use constitutes a potential challenge in translation because of cross-linguistic differences: while the subject must be expressed in non-null subject languages, this is not necessary in null subject languages. The aim of the lecture is twofold: first, to show that the type of source language influences the frequency of personal pronouns in translation, and second, to establish whether translations into a null subject language differ from comparable target language originals in terms of pronominal subject use. The study is based on the analysis of a 625,000-word corpus comprising original and translated popular science texts in Slovene and the corresponding source texts in English and Italian. The results confirm that pronominal subjects are more frequent in translations from English, a non-null subject language; furthermore, they are more frequent in translations than in comparable originals. Atypical cohesive patterns are identified in translations and possible reasons for their presence are explored.
6. Wednesday, January 22, 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM in OISE 5230: "Italian pronunciation in dictionaries for young learners" (Robert Grošelj):
The aim of the lecture will be the representation of Italian pronunciation features in dictionaries for Slovene young learners. The analysis will include five categories of phonetic-phonological features, important for pronunciation learning: pronunciation guides, phonetic transcription, phonemes, consonant length and accent. The representation of these features in a dictionary for young learners should be clear and coherent, in some cases (especially in dictionaries for the youngest users) accompanied by audio pronunciations. After a brief presentation of foreign language/second language pronunciation teaching and learning and the role dictionaries play in it, the Italian pronunciation in Slovene dictionaries for young learners will be analysed. The dictionaries analysed are incomplete with regard to the presentation of pronunciation features: most of them do not include audio recordings; phonological transcriptions of the entries and pronunciation guides – when a dictionary includes them – are incomplete; some dictionaries do not include any useful information about Italian pronunciation which limits the possibility of their use.
7. Thursday, January 23, 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM in room 418 of the Faculty of Social Work: "Structural gaps and how to bridge them – the case of the nominalized infinitive" (Tamara Mikolič Južnič):
The lecture will present a textual shift that was observed in a comparison between the Italian nominalized infinitive and its Slovene translations. The nominalized infinitive essentially allows a process to be worded as a nominal structure, while (at least partly) retaining its verbal nature; in the framework of systemic functional grammar, it is explained as a type of grammatical metaphor, i.e. nominalization. The absence of a parallel structure in the grammar of Slovene requires the translator to look for other means of expression. A corpus analysis, carried out with the aid of a parallel corpus which comprises both literary and non-literary Italian texts and their Slovene translations, shows that the dual (nominal and verbal) nature of the nominalized infinitive is reflected in two main types of translation equivalents and several minor ones. It is argued that the strategies displayed in the choice of these translation equivalents can be viewed as instances of obligatory explicitation, either norm-governed or strategic. Thus the main goals of the paper are to identify the textual shifts and strategies found in the parallel corpus and to see whether they can be explained as manifestations of explicitation.
8. Thursday, January 23, 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM in room 418 of the Faculty of Social Work: "The supine and the supine clause in South Slavic languages" (Robert Grošelj):
The topic of the lecture will be the evolution of the supine (a nonfinite verb form used after verbs of movement, indicating their goal) and the supine clause in South Slavic languages. The analysis of the historical and contemporary language situations shows a gradual loss of the supine from the South-East toward the North-West. The supine, still present in Old Church Slavonic, has been completely replaced by the analytic da-clause in Bulgarian and Macedonian, and by the infinitive in Štokavian (in most dialects) and Čakavian. On the other hand, the supine is still preserved in Kajkavian and Slovenian, although the situation varies diachronically and diatopically (e.g. in some dialects it has merged with the infinitive). The lecture will present, in addition, a number of clause types (the final finite clause, the infinitive clause, the za ‘for’ + infinitive construction) that replaced the supine clause or still compete with it in South Slavic languages.
No comments:
Post a Comment