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

Abstract

Languages differ in how systematically and obligatorily they encode conceptual categories such as tense and aspect. By drawing on large parallel corpora, these differences can be exploited heuristically: expressive obligatoriness and the systematicity of a conceptual category in one language can function as a probe for other languages that do not (evidently) encode it. This study applies this method—called heuristic translation mining (HTM)—to viewpoint aspect in Mandarin (an aspect-oriented language) and Dutch (a non-aspect-oriented language). Specifically, it takes the Mandarin aspect markers 起来-qilai (“ingressive”) and 下去-xiaqu (“continuative”) and collects translation strategies for these markers from a corpus of five Mandarin novels and their Dutch translations. The outcomes are methodological, descriptive and theoretical in nature. Methodologically, it is shown how conceptual templates consisting of temporal boundaries and phases facilitate annotating specific types of viewpoint aspect consistently. Descriptively, the exercise indicates at which linguistic levels viewpoint aspect may be encoded in a non-aspect-oriented language. Theoretically, conducting an HTM analysis with several aspect markers at once makes it possible to quantify (non-)marking of conceptual content; it turns out that the types of viewpoint under study correspond to varying marking frequencies, which may correlate with conceptual complexity.

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

“…The rationale behind our selection of parallel corpus traditions is that they represent the three strategies that are a priori available to control for translation biases within corpus research: the Typological tradition restricts the scope of the questions that can be asked, and the Contrastive and Translation Mining traditions rely on monolingual and parallel control corpora, respectively. We are confident that other traditions, such as Multiple Parallel Text Analysis (Lu and Verhagen 2016;Lu et al 2018), Heuristic Translation Mining (Bogaards 2019(Bogaards , 2022 etc., can insightfully be related to one of the traditions discussed here. 1…”

“…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 number of parallel corpus-based papers in this Special Issue (see Bogaards (2022); Corre (2022); Fuchs and González (2022); Gehrke (2022); Mulder et al (2022); de Swart et al (2022)) bears witness to the increasing role that parallel corpora play in recent crosslinguistic research on tense and aspect. In the early 2000s, however, the same empirical domain led some members of the linguistic community to turn their backs on parallel corpus research, capitalizing on the issue of representativeness (McEnery and Xiao 1999;McEnery et al 2006).…”

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

“…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.…”

Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Approaches to Aspect: The Case of the Dutch Prepositional Progressive

“…I should point out, however, that there is some notable work that goes beyond examining aan het VINF zijn as an isolated progressive construction, which the present study takes as a starting point. For example, Bogaards et al (2022) compare the aan het-progressive to the ingressive variants with gaan 'go' or slaan 'hit' as the matrix verb, as in 2a. They conclude that these are two different syntactic constructions and situate the aan hetprogressive higher on a synchronic lexical-to-functional cline than the aan het-ingressive (that is, the former is more grammaticalized).…”