A multilingual corpus study of the competition betweenpastandperfectin narrative discourse

Abstract

The western European present perfect is subject to substantial crosslinguistic variation. The literature, however, focuses on individual languages or on comparisons of a restricted number of languages. We piece together the puzzle and do so in a data-driven way by comparing the use of the present perfect through a parallel corpus based on the French novel L’Étranger and its translations in Italian, German, Dutch, European Spanish, British English, and Modern Greek. We introduce and showcase Translation Mining, a software suite combining a parallel corpus database with annotation and analysis tools. Translation Mining allows us to generate descriptive statistics of tense use across languages but also to visualize variation through its multidimensional scaling component and to link the variation we find to the underlying data through its integrated setup. We confirm that the present perfect competes with the past and we reveal the fine-grained scalar nature of the variation. To complete the puzzle, we ascertain the dimensions of variation, ranging from lexical and compositional semantics to dynamic semantics and pragmatics.1

Parallel Corpus Research and Target Language Representativeness: The Contrastive, Typological, and Translation Mining Traditions

“…The assumption of representativeness is, in general, not taken to be absolute: most papers that use parallel corpus data acknowledge that translated language differs from untranslated language and stress the preliminary or qualitative nature of their observations (see, e.g., Bogaards (2022), Grønn and von Stechow (2020)). At the same time, we find that recent studies using parallel corpora neatly succeed in replicating and fine-tuning crosslinguistic patterns that are predicted by the literature (see, e.g., Beekhuizen et al (2017) on indefinite pronouns, and van der Klis et al (2021a) on the HAVE-PERFECT), suggesting that the conclusions we can draw from parallel data are more reliable than what is generally assumed. The goal of the current paper is to bring together and evaluate methodological insights into how parallel corpus research allows us to go beyond preliminary observations, while, at the same time, guarding us from overstating the findings.…”

Perfect-Perfective Variation across Spanish Dialects: A Parallel-Corpus Study

“…There are also seven cases where English uses a Present Perfect and the three Spanish translations use a PI, contra a generalization advanced in van der Klis et al (2021), which claims that English use of PERFECT forms is a proper subset of Spanish ones. It is remarkable, however, that five of these seven cases have a contracted auxiliary and, moreover, are cases in which the Simple Past form is identical to the English Past Participle.…”

“…We use a new methodology in which parallel corpora are analyzed to compare crosslinguistic data (e.g., Wälchli and Cysouw 2012;van der Klis et al 2017van der Klis et al , 2021Bogaards 2022;Mulder et al 2022). We gather our data from three different Spanish translations of chapters 1, 16 and 17 of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.…”

“…Most theoretical accounts that address the variation in use between forms that instantiate Perfect and Perfective meanings are based predominantly on English data (e.g., McCoard 1978;McCawley 1981;Michaelis 1994;Portner 2003; Nishiyama and Koening 2010), although some recent work has started to consider other European languages, such as German, French, and Dutch (e.g., Löbner 2002;Vet 1992;Schaden 2009;Le Bruyn et al 2019), or even a crosslinguistic perspective (e.g., de Swart 2007;van der Klis et al 2021;Bertrand et al 2022). The main goal of this body of research has been to arrive at a concrete semantics for the Perfect, in order to account for the distribution of (PRESENT) PERFECT 1 of our study: the use of parallel corpora and the application of multidimensional scaling to visualize crossdialectal variation patterns.…”

The Discovery of Aspect: A Heuristic Parallel Corpus Study of Ingressive, Continuative and Resumptive Viewpoint Aspect

“…It is well known that aspect may interact with discourse type (de Swart 2007). In the case of Dutch, use of the Perfect (vis-à-vis the Simple Past) depends on whether one is dealing with narrative or non-narrative discourse (Boogaart 1999;Le Bruyn et al 2019;van der Klis et al 2020van der Klis et al , 2021. 5 In the English and Dutch data collected by Le Bruyn et al (2019, p. 168), the Perfect only shows up in non-narrative discourse, never in narrative discourse.…”