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.
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.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203216938

This volume is a revised and extended edition of Epistemische Bedeutung (Doherty 1985). The German and the English versions dif fer in a number of aspects, only two of which can be attributed to the difference between German and English: A number of com binatorial options of epistemic particles discussed in Epistemische Bedeutung have not been included in the English version, as the English-speaking reader may be expected to be more interested in the general aspects of the topic than in the specific properties of a class of linguistic entities which does not exist in English at all. The second difference between the German and English editions concerns a ter minological change: "Evaluative Einstellungen" has been translated not as "evaluative;' but as "emotional attitudes;' This has become necessary, as "Bewertung" ("evaluation") has been introduced to replace "Urtei/" ("judgement;' "assessment"), which was a mor phologically less transparent term, lacking a full-fledged paradigm of derivations to cope with the various applications of this central no tion. The terminological change yielded labels for the complex com ponents of epistemic meaning (namely "evaluated" and "semi evaluated propositional meaning") which had remained without names in the German edition. Though the change from "judgement" to "evaluation" is mainly one of terminology and has not introduced any new content, it was connected with a revision in the way the logical nature of the basic epistemic elements is represented."

Dass dieselbe Information innerhalb verschiedensprachiger Verbalisierungen an unterschiedlichen Stellen in unterschiedlichen Formen auftreten kann, ist eine Binsenweisheit welchen Bedingungen diese unterschiedliche Informationsverteilung unterliegt, ist jedoch eine Fragestellung, zu der es bisher in der einschlagigen Fachliteratur nur zum Teil genauere Vorstellungen gibt. Die Luckenhaftigkeit der Annahmen macht sich besonders gravierend in der Wissenschaft vom Ubersetzen bemerkbar, in der es aus linguistischer Sicht primar um die Sprachspezifik von Informationsverteilung geht. Der vorliegende Band bringt entsprechende ubersetzungswissenschaftliche Fragestellungen und einschlagige linguistische Annahmen zusammen, um sie fur die Interessierten beider Disziplinen wechselweise transparent zu machen."

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. 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.