No abstract

Metadiscourse features refer to those elements by which interaction between writer-reader and/or speaker-audience is constructed. Taking this into account, the objective of this contrastive parallel corpus-based study was to explore the way metadiscourse features were used and distributed in the English discourse and their translation in the Persian language as well as analyzing the speaker-audience interaction in translation. For this purpose, 30 different TED talks in politics were randomly selected to ensure the issues of corpus representativeness and balance. The corpus consisted of 21681 tokens in English and 21164 tokens in Persian. For classifying the metadiscourse features, the model introduced by Hyland (Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. Continuum, London, 2005), whose model is classified into two main subcategories of interactive and interactional, was employed. The quantitative analysis showed that overall the number of interactional metadiscourse features was used more than that of the interactive ones in both corpora. Moreover, the results of the Chi-square test revealed that there was statistically no significant difference between the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features in English corpus and their Persian translation. The qualitative analysis revealed that there were four kinds of changes in translation as (im) explicit change, (dis)information change, (in) visibility change, and (de)emphasis change. Besides, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus revealed that the interaction between the speakers of the TED talks and the audience did not change when metadiscourse features translated from English into Persian. The results of this research can be found useful for researchers in contrastive analysis, translation studies, and corpus-based translation studies.

This study investigates the functions of væ (‘and’) as a discourse marker in Persian. More specifically, this study accounts for certain aspects of væ co-occurrences and their linearization order. Fraser’s model (forthcoming) was mainly employed to classify the multiple functions conveyed by væ. A corpus-based approach was taken to provide an overview of væ co-occurrences with other discourse markers. The data were collected from both written and spoken corpora. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to examine the frequency and the functional differences in the use of væ in the data – namely, elaboration, inferential, contrast, and alternation. The results of the study indicate the mobile nature of væ in its co-occurrences with other DMs. The findings also show that some modifications to Fraser’s (forthcoming) DM co-occurrence principles are required to handle certain cases of language-specific behavior of væ in Persian. The configuration suggested for væ uses and its multi-functionality will also shed some lights on cross-linguistic studies of its counterparts in other languages.

No abstract

No abstract