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.Subject and predicate are primary relations, which can be modifiedby secondary relations, as for example adverbials, like at the beginning ofcreation, which modifies the entire sentence.There are many English sentence structures like (f).(e) The emergence of form began with creation.is just one of them.But there are also many German sentence structuressimilar to (f), although the original is not among them.Setting the scene 15Verbs, nouns, subjects, adverbials  these and similar categories andrelations are the inventory from which the variety of paraphrases areformed.The variation could concern the positions of constituents, as in:(a) At the beginning of creation stands the emergence of form.and:(c) The emergence of form stands at the beginning of creation.where the temporal adverbial and the subject swap places.It could alsoconcern the grammatical relation of the constituent as in:(e) The emergence of form began with creation.and:(f) Creation began with the emergence of form.where the things talked about are alternatively encoded as subject or astemporal adverbial; it could even concern word formation, as in Gestalt-bildung vs.the emergence of form, etc.The difference in the grammatical relations could be associated with adifference in the word class, as in (c) and (f ), where the temporal relation isexpressed by the noun beginning in the adverbial phrase or the verb began inthe predicate, and so on and so forth.Linguistic knowledge does not end with the repertoire of syntacticelements and relations, however.It comprises all the information of thelexicon of a language and this does not only determine the way in whichindividual elements can be combined into phrases and clauses, it determinesalso what the lexical elements mean.Meaning can be subdivided into semantic meaning, carried by the lin-guistic forms themselves (including phonetic and syntactic-morphologicalaspects), and contextualized meaning, enriched by the knowledge associatedwith a particular contextual usage of a linguistic expression.The categorialrepertoire of semantic elements can be generalized into individuals andpredicates forming propositions, that is, meanings that can be subjected tomodal modifications and assessed in regard to their truth values.Let meillustrate this.The examples:(e) The emergence of form began with creation.and:(f) Creation began with the emergence of form.16 Setting the sceneexpress the same propositional meaning, constituted by the individualscreation, the emergence of form and the predicate began (with).The contextually  instantiated meaning (that is, the meaning that is usedin a certain context) is used in an interactive situation, where it acquires acertain communicative sense,3 in our example that of an assertion (by whichthe speaker claims that what (s)he says is true).Seen within its discoursecontext, the meaning of a sentence constitutes a simple or complexinformation unit, structured into various layers according to their functionswithin the progress of discourse as topic and comment, background andfocus, which are basic concepts to be taken up in more detail later on.Fornow, it may suffice to note that (e) and (f) structure their propositionalmeanings alternatively.Although the line is difficult to draw, there is a linguistic and an extra-linguistic part of meaning.The former is carried by our (mostly implicit)linguistic knowledge, the latter by our knowledge about the relevant worldand general principles of inference.Looking at translation under the aspectof contextual appropriateness, we have to access both types of meaning.Agreat deal of the extralinguistic meaning is provided by the linguisticallyencoded co-text.Although the contextualized meaning is built up fromlinguistic knowledge, it is enriched by all the extralinguistic aspects associ-ated with it, which can be highly specialized knowledge (as in the exampleabout the polymers) including all the culture-specific aspects which may playa role in the discourse.Linguistic meaning itself can be expressed explicitly and implicitly, withdifferent degrees of affirmativeness in case of presuppositions and implica-tions.The latter can again be distinguished into conventionalized impli-cations, that is purely linguistic meaning, and conversational implicatures(Grice 1975), which draw upon extralinguistic meaning.It is the conver-sational implicatures associated with the original and (f) that compensate forthe difference between the propositional meanings of the German and theEnglish version.(See the further discussion of this example in Chapter 2.)Sentence processingIdentifying the linguistic properties that distinguish various paraphrases issimply a precondition for the crucial question to which we will now return:why would one prefer a paraphrase with property X to other paraphraseswithin a certain context? And the general answer to this question suggestedwas: property X is easier to process than alternative properties [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]