Shifting viewpoints : How does that actually work across languages? An exercise in parallel text analysis
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | The questions that comparative stylistic research is dealing with are simultaneously quite concrete and quite general. On the one hand, we are interested in a very concrete question of cross-linguistic comparison: How exactly is a specific discourse pattern in English– one in which the dominant viewpoint shifts from the narrator to a character in a story rather smoothly– rendered in Chinese, a language that does not have direct parallels of the linguistic features that constitute the English pattern? On the other hand, and at the same time, we are interested in a much more general theoretical and methodological question, namely, how precisely this type of question may and should be investigated: What procedures and what kind of data are appropriate, and especially: What is the status of concepts that we use in such a comparative study? The main goal of this paper is to address these general methodological and conceptual questions. We will do so by means of a detailed comparison of a small number of highly significant text fragments involving mixed viewpoints, using parallel texts: four translations from an English original to Chinese, and one from Chinese to English. |