Modeling form-function mapping as a challenge of contrastive linguistics: Concessive connectives in English and German translation and interpreting

One of the most important characteristics of Contrastive Linguistics, in comparison to other comparative approaches to the study of language, is its connection to applied fields of linguistics, such as foreign language acquisition and teaching (Lado 1957, Kortmann 1998) and translation and interpreting studies (e.g. Hansen-Schirra and Czulo 2017). While contrastive linguistics has not so far been prominently linked to psycholinguistics, there are moreover indirect relations to this field via the aforementioned disciplines (e.g. Lörscher 1991), not least because the study of bilingualism is directly relevant to contrastive linguistics (e.g. Grosjean 2024). One of the central challenges that all of these approaches face is crosslinguistic variation in form-function mapping. Language learners need to learn that expression x (e.g. although) from language A (English) is not fully equivalent to expression y (obwohl) from language B (German), translators and interpreters face the challenge of finding linguistic near equivalents (under different constraints), and the bilingual brain in general needs to manage the n-to-n relations between meanings and forms from different languages. A key challenge for all of these fields is, therefore, to model form-function mappings within as well as across languages. This challenge falls squarely into the field of Contrastive Linguistics, where evidence from language acquisition and learning, translation and interpreting studies and psycholinguistics as well as bilingualism can be brought together.

In this talk I will propose a model of form-function mapping in the domain of concessivity, based on data from English and German (cf. also Gast 2019). The distribution of concessives is captured by a set of domain-general variables, i.e., variables that are relevant beyond the domain of concessivity. Generally speaking, there are four types of relations between two expressions x (from language A) and y (from language B) if x and y have overlapping distributions, (i) dist(x) ~ dist(y), (ii) dist(x) ⊂ dist(y), (iii) dist(x) ⊃ dist(y), and (iv) dist(x) ∩ dist(y) (where dist(e) maps expression e to the set of context types where e is used). From an applied point of view, I will focus on cases (ii) and (iii), which amount to explicitation and implication, respectively. I will show that explicitation is prevalent in written translation because translators avoid information loss, whereas interpreters, working under time pressure and high cognitive load, tend to choose more general correspondences in the target language, minimizing the risk of mistranslations.