Overview

What do we choose to begin a sentence? How do we highlight the most important information in a sentence? This book argues that language systems determine language use to a greater extent than is generally assumed. The author demonstrates how the typological characteristics of a language determine even the most general aspects of our stylistic preferences. Through extensive analysis of examples in German and English, the author demonstrates how analogous options of sentence structure must be surrendered in order to achieve felicitous translations. Two major aspects that determine the appropriateness of language use are examined: language processing and discourse-dependency. The most important area where the typological characteristics of a language interact with language processing, Doherty argues, is the area of information structure, that is, the way in which thoughts are packaged into sentence structures to express informational progress. Investigating examples such as the different verb positions of German and English, she shows how such variances have far-reaching repercussions in terms of word order, case frame and structural explicitness. Essential reading for translation scholars and linguists involved in the comparative study of English and German, this book will also be of interest to scholars of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, as well as translators and linguists more generally.

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9780415281898

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Monika Doherty began her career with the study of English, Russian and General Linguistics in Berlin (PhD in 1969, Professor in 1981). She concentrated on semantics, later pragmatics, and translation. In 1990 she was appointed Professor for Translation Theory. Two major publications contributed to her success with a wider readership: Übersetzen (2nd ed. 1997) and Das grammatische Varieté (4th ed. 1998).

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