VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS AND MEANING INTERPRETATION - Case study of the verb CONSIDER – by Renate Reichardt A thesis submitted to the for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies The University of Birmingham October 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Dedicated to Marie and Otto Reichardt Page ii ABSTRACT This thesis explores the interrelationship of local grammar, meaning, and translation equivalence, using a case study of the English verb CONSIDER, compared in a monolingual study with its near-synonyms BELIEVE, FEEL and THINK, and in a contrastive analysis with their German translation equivalents. The methodology fuses corpus linguistics and valency grammar, analysing and comparing monolingual and parallel corpora. Corpus investigation is found to be a reliable tool in identifying key translation equivalents and in verifying sentence patterns. Valency theory is argued to be more successful than related approaches in distinguishing between different levels of language analysis. Its flexibility regarding complement categorisation types make it possible to define categories that can be applied to both German and English appropriately in a contrastive study, in spite of the surface differences between the two languages. The findings highlight the problems of investigating the interplay of lexis and grammar in a contrastive context, and indicate that from the perspective of translation, language is much less rule-based and less phraseological than is often assumed. Applications of the research to the field of bilingual lexicography are discussed. Based on the corpus analysis and the valency analysis some sample dictionary entries are proposed. Page iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the large number of people who have had an impact on my work. To list them all would be never ending, including staff at the University of Birmingham, fellow research students, speakers at conferences and my friends and family. The support of them all is greatly appreciated. In particular, I wish to thank my supervisors. Prof. Wolfgang Teubert, for motivation and inspiration, posing critical questions and encouraging me to look at things from different angles. Also, Prof. Susan Hunston for questioning my interpretation of sources, together with support on structuring and presenting my findings. I am extremely grateful to them. I would also like to specifically mention the assistance received from other institutions in providing access to their corpora, introductions to corpus programmes, stimulating discussions, and the use of libraries. At the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim I appreciate the help of Monika Pohlschmidt, Rainer Perkuhn and Jacqueline Kubczak, and at University of Oslo, the assistance of Prof. Hilde Hasselgård at the Faculty of Humanities. I am also grateful to the University of Cambridge for access to the many books on valency in their library. Page iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii List of Tables viii List of Figures x Abbreviations xi 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 RESEARCH TOPIC 1 1.2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS 2 1.3 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS 4 1.3.1 Related Studies 11 1.4 OUTLINE OF THE THESIS 17 2 METHODOLOGY OF THE CASE STUDY 20 2.1 INTRODUCTION 20 2.2 METHODOLOGY 20 2.2.1 Procedure 28 2.2.2 Conventions 34 2.3 HYPOTHESES FOR THE CASE STUDY 34 2.4 CONCLUSION 36 3 CORPUS LINGUISTICS IN A MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT 37 3.1 INTRODUCTION 37 3.2 THE USE OF CORPORA IN LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS 39 3.2.1 Aspects of Corpus Linguistics 40 3.2.2 Types of Corpora 46 3.2.3 Comparison of the Corpora Used for the Case Study Investigation 48 3.3 CORPORA, CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS AND TRANSLATION 53 3.3.1 Unit of Translation – Translation Correspondence – Translation 55 Equivalent 3.4 CORPORA AND BILINGUAL LEXICOGRAPHY 61 3.5 USE OF CORPORA AND TRANSLATION IN SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING 67 3.6 CONCLUSION 69 4 ASPECTS OF VALENCY COMPLEMENT CATEGORISATION 71 4.1 INTRODUCTION 71 4.2 CATEGORISATION BY WORD-CLASS 73 4.3 CATEGORISATION BY SYNTACTIC FUNCTION 77 4.3.1 Grammatical, Psychological and Logical Subjects 78 4.3.2 Syntactic Aspects in Systemic Functional Grammar 82 4.4 CATEGORISATION BY SYNTACTIC CASE 86 4.4.1 Syntactic Case in English 88 4.5 CATEGORISATION BY SEMANTIC FEATURES 89 4.6 CATEGORISATION BY SEMANTIC ROLES 92 4.6.1 Semantic Roles in Traditional Case Analysis 96 4.6.2 Systemic Functional Grammar 98 4.6.3 Case Grammar and Frame Semantics 103 4.6.4 Construction Grammar 111 4.7 CONCLUSION 119 Page v 5 SYNTACTIC VALENCY COMPLEMENTS IN CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS 122 5.1 INTRODUCTION 122 5.2 VALENCY THEORY: A LOCAL GRAMMAR 123 5.2.1 General Grammar vs. Local Grammar 128 5.2.2 Valency and Transitivity Analysis 130 5.2.3 Valency Theory and Constituency Grammar 134 5.3 SYNTACTIC VALENCY 141 5.3.1 Complements and Adjuncts 141 5.3.1.1 Permutation test 142 5.3.1.2 Commutation test 143 5.3.1.3 Elimination test 146 5.3.1.4 Question test 152 5.3.2 Comparison of English and German Valency Complements 154 5.3.2.1 Case complements 156 5.3.2.2 Adverbial complements (Adverbialergänzung) 159 5.3.2.3 Predicative complements (Prädikativergänzung) 160 5.3.2.4 Verbal Complements (Verbativergänzung) 162 5.3.3 Valency Sentence Patterns (Satzbaupläne) 164 5.3.3.1 Valency Complements for the Contrastive Study: English - German 165 5.4 CONCLUSION 167 6 CASE STUDY: ‘CONSIDER’ – VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS AND THEIR FREQUENCIES – 170 6.1 INTRODUCTION TO THE CASE STUDY 170 6.1.1 Introduction to the Chapter 171 6.2 THE VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS OF CONSIDER 172 6.2.1 CONSIDER 173 6.2.2 The Monovalent Sentence Pattern 175 6.2.3 The Divalent Sentence Patterns 176 6.2.4 The Trivalent Sentence Patterns 178 6.2.4.1 Predicative complements: nominal and adjectival complements 180 6.2.4.2 Nominal and adjectival complements with ‘as’ 180 6.2.4.3 Verbal complements 182 6.2.4.4 Prepositional complements 188 6.2.5 Complements with Correlate it Structure 189 6.2.6 Other Issues Regarding Valency Complement Identification 190 6.2.6.1 Passive structures 190 6.2.6.2 Functions of the present participle form ‘considering’ 191 6.2.6.3 Functions of the past participle form ‘considered’ 192 6.2.6.4 Direct speech 192 6.2.6.5 Idioms 193 6.3 VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS OF BELIEVE, FEEL AND THINK 194 6.3.1 BELIEVE 195 6.3.2 FEEL 198 6.3.3 THINK 202 6.4 COMPARISON OF VERBS AND THEIR VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS 207 6.5 FREQUENCIES OF THE IDENTIFIED VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS 211 6.6 CONCLUSION 218 Page vi 7 CASE STUDY: ‘CONSIDER’ – VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS AND TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS – 221 7.1 INTRODUCTION 221 7.2 THE GERMAN TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS OF CONSIDER 222 7.2.1 Bilingual Dictionary Entries 223 7.2.2 Translation Equivalents of CONSIDER in Parallel Corpora 225 7.2.3 Comparison of Bilingual Dictionary Entries and Corpora Findings 233 7.3 COMPARISON OF TES FOR CONSIDER, BELIEVE, FEEL AND THINK 239 7.4 VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS OF CONSIDER AND TES OF CONSIDER 242 7.4.1 Valency Sentence Patterns of CONSIDER, BELIEVE, FEEL and THINK and their ‘shared’ TEs 252 7.5 THE MOST FREQUENT TES AND THEIR VALENCY SENTENCE PATTERNS 253 7.5.1 The TE HALTEN 254 7.5.2 The TE BETRACHTEN 257 7.5.3 The TE PRÜFEN 261 7.5.4 Support-Verb-Constructions vs. Adjuncts 261 7.5.5 The TE BEDENKEN 263 7.5.6 Interchangeability of the TEs 265 7.5.6.1 The valency sentence pattern <sub obj> and its TEs 265 7.5.6.2 The valency sentence pattern <sub obj-that> and its TEs 267 7.5.6.3 The valency sentence patterns <sub obj vb-to-be-adj / -nom> and their TEs 268 7.6 CONCLUSION 270 8 SPECIMEN DICTIONARY ENTRIES FOR ‘CONSIDER’ 274 8.1 INTRODUCTION 274 8.2 MONOLINGUAL LEARNER DICTIONARIES 277 8.2.1 Collins Cobuild English Dictionary and Valency Dictionary of English 277 8.2.2 VALBU (E-VALBU) 285 8.3 BILINGUAL DICTIONARY ENTRIES FOR THE VERB CONSIDER 288 8.4 SUGGESTED SPECIMEN DICTIONARY ENTRIES FOR CONSIDER 294 8.4.1 Bilingual Dictionary Entry 295 8.4.2 Monolingual English Thesaurus – Semantic Fields 305 8.5 CONCLUSION 308 9 THESIS CONCLUSIONS 310 9.1 INTRODUCTION 310 9.2 ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE THESIS 311 9.3 IMPLICATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 317 9.4 EPILOGUE 319 BIBLIOGRAPHY 321 APPENDICES 336 Appendix I 336 Appendix II 338 Appendix III 340 Appendix IV 342 Appendix V 344 Page vii LIST OF TABLES Tab. 1.1: Meaning categories and their collocations for the polysemous verb EINSTELLEN 12 Tab. 1.2: CVVD entry for the verb CONSIDER 15 Tab. 2.1: Valency pattern distribution in four samples of CONSIDER with the TEs HALTEN and BETRACHTEN 33 Tab. 3.1: Comparison of the sizes of EuroParl, OMC, BoE and DeReKo 49 Tab. 3.2: Comparison of the word-forms of CONSIDER in EuroParl, OMC and BoE 50 Tab. 3.3: Chi-square and degree of freedom for the word-forms of CONSIDER in EuroParl, OMC and BoE 51 Tab.