Options
Modality mapping onto clause types: comparing modality in a parallel corpus of early New Testament translations
Titre du projet
Modality mapping onto clause types: comparing modality in a parallel corpus of early New Testament translations
Description
Abstract scientifique
Since the seminal work by Palmer (1986, 2001), research on modality has been thriving. Given the valuable amount of data collected in the past decades on several hundred idioms, it has become urgent to address the issue of the comparability of the expressions of modality across languages. Among various methods to investigate modality (van der Auwera and Diewald 2012), the parallel corpus method offers the possibility to compare the use of modality markers in the same context of use. However, a fine-tuned methodology to apply to parallel corpora in order to investigate the comparability of modality is still a desideratum, including discussion of how equivalence is determined and what the limitations of the translation practice are, as translation can be more or less representative of the uses of a modality marker. Developing the results of the SNSF project A World of Possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony of modality in the Latin language (henceforth WoPoss, see: https://woposs.unine.ch/) on the interaction of lexical modality markers with other aspects of the sentences in which they appear, this follow up develops an innovative methodology based on annotation of explicit and implicit modality at the level of clause types and aims at providing an easily-exportable modality mapping. The approach is different from WoPoss in a number of ways, but extends and complements it. In this new project I include the investigation of mood as well. The methodology follows an onomasiological approach and the annotation is also carried out for implicit modality based on an analysis that starts at the level of the clause. The corpus is multi-lingual, featuring, as the project core, the early Latin translations of the Ancient Greek New Testament (Vetus Latina and Vulgate) and, as an optional module, the study of other early Indo-European translations. The interest of this module lies in the possibility of both testing the mapping model and enhancing our knowledge of modality in the ancient Indo-European languages. The New Testament stands out as the ideal choice as a source text to set up the modality mapping. The devised mapping will be applicable to a very high number of literal translations (from Ancient Greek or from Latin) from Antiquity until today. A linguistically and philologically enhanced corpus taking into account the main modality-related variants of the manuscript tradition, the reconstructed Vorlagen and the various choices of the translators will allow a better understanding of the margins of variation in the expression of modality for each language. The Latin translations will be evaluated against texts from the WoPoss corpus for the same period. The Latin translation of the Gospels by Jerome of Stridon will be also evaluated against two sub-corpora of his other translations (Origenes) from Greek and his original works (Lives of Paul, Malchus and Hilarion). In the final stage of the project the PI (and the collaborators) will produce a synthesis of the results and will complete and publish a monograph. The outputs and results of the project-annotated database containing the source text and the translations, exportable modality mapping, monograph-will be of interest to researchers in many fields, including historical and general linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, classical philology, translation studies, corpus linguistics, typology, Biblical studies and ancient history.
Since the seminal work by Palmer (1986, 2001), research on modality has been thriving. Given the valuable amount of data collected in the past decades on several hundred idioms, it has become urgent to address the issue of the comparability of the expressions of modality across languages. Among various methods to investigate modality (van der Auwera and Diewald 2012), the parallel corpus method offers the possibility to compare the use of modality markers in the same context of use. However, a fine-tuned methodology to apply to parallel corpora in order to investigate the comparability of modality is still a desideratum, including discussion of how equivalence is determined and what the limitations of the translation practice are, as translation can be more or less representative of the uses of a modality marker. Developing the results of the SNSF project A World of Possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony of modality in the Latin language (henceforth WoPoss, see: https://woposs.unine.ch/) on the interaction of lexical modality markers with other aspects of the sentences in which they appear, this follow up develops an innovative methodology based on annotation of explicit and implicit modality at the level of clause types and aims at providing an easily-exportable modality mapping. The approach is different from WoPoss in a number of ways, but extends and complements it. In this new project I include the investigation of mood as well. The methodology follows an onomasiological approach and the annotation is also carried out for implicit modality based on an analysis that starts at the level of the clause. The corpus is multi-lingual, featuring, as the project core, the early Latin translations of the Ancient Greek New Testament (Vetus Latina and Vulgate) and, as an optional module, the study of other early Indo-European translations. The interest of this module lies in the possibility of both testing the mapping model and enhancing our knowledge of modality in the ancient Indo-European languages. The New Testament stands out as the ideal choice as a source text to set up the modality mapping. The devised mapping will be applicable to a very high number of literal translations (from Ancient Greek or from Latin) from Antiquity until today. A linguistically and philologically enhanced corpus taking into account the main modality-related variants of the manuscript tradition, the reconstructed Vorlagen and the various choices of the translators will allow a better understanding of the margins of variation in the expression of modality for each language. The Latin translations will be evaluated against texts from the WoPoss corpus for the same period. The Latin translation of the Gospels by Jerome of Stridon will be also evaluated against two sub-corpora of his other translations (Origenes) from Greek and his original works (Lives of Paul, Malchus and Hilarion). In the final stage of the project the PI (and the collaborators) will produce a synthesis of the results and will complete and publish a monograph. The outputs and results of the project-annotated database containing the source text and the translations, exportable modality mapping, monograph-will be of interest to researchers in many fields, including historical and general linguistics, Indo-European linguistics, classical philology, translation studies, corpus linguistics, typology, Biblical studies and ancient history.
Chercheur principal
Statut
Ongoing
Date de début
1 Février 2023
Date de fin
31 Janvier 2025
Organisations
Identifiant interne
50483
identifiant
Mots-clés
3 Résultats
Voici les éléments 1 - 3 sur 3
- PublicationAccès libreCorpus parallèles et apprentissage des langues anciennes: les Évangiles comme corpus multilingue pour apprendre le grec ancien et le latin (avec un focus sur la modalité)Ces dernières années, l'importance de la traduction dans la classe de langue moderne a été redécouverte. De plus, les nouvelles technologies permettent un accès plus facile à des corpus de traduction, bilingues ou multilingues (corpus parallèles), qui peuvent avoir des applications dans l'enseignement. Dans cette contribution, après avoir présenté brièvement l'avènement du ”translation turn” dans l'enseignement des langues, je me penche sur le cas de l'enseignement des langues anciennes, en particulier le grec ancien et le latin. Je présente un nouvel outil, un jeu de données parallèles grec ancien - latin - langue moderne contenant les Évangiles et, pour le grec ancien et le latin, des passages modaux annotés. Je montre également comment il peut être utilisé en classe en proposant quelques exercices. / In recent years, the importance of translation in the modern language classroom has been rediscovered. Moreover, new technologies allow for easier access to bilingual or multilingual translational corpora (parallel corpora) which can have applications in teaching. In this contribution, after briefly presenting the advent of the "translation turn" in language teaching, I look at the case of the teaching of ancient languages, in particular Ancient Greek and Latin. I present a new tool, a parallel Ancient Greek - Latin - Modern Language dataset containing the Gospels and, for Ancient Greek and Latin, annotated modal passages. I also show how it can be used in the classroom by suggesting some exercises.
- PublicationAccès libreVolition ascription to the addressee in a diachronic perspective(2025)Abstract Pragmatic studies have recently shown that volition ascription to the addressee corresponds to specific strategies and deserves more attention. This paper discusses a series of post-volitional developments attested by second-person forms of the Latin verb uolo (‘I want’). Whilst these grammaticalisation phenomena — some of which are also attested cross-linguistically — have mainly been dealt with separately, this paper shows that they can be treated in a unified manner, as all originally employ volition ascription as a conversational strategy. In Latin, uolo constructions featuring the verb in the second person allowed the speaker to offer the addressee options to choose from or, in the case of prohibitive sentences, to preclude them from a specific choice. In this way, this paper sheds new light on volition ascription strategies as a pragmatic device and their diachronic developments in Latin as well as cross-linguistically.
- PublicationAccès libreMulti-layered semantic annotation and the formalisation of annotation schemas for the investigation of modality in a Latin corpusThis paper stems from the project A World of Possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony of modality in the Latin language (WoPoss) which involves a corpus-based approach to the study of modality in the history of the Latin language. Linguistic annotation and, in particular, the semantic annotation of modality is a keystone of the project. Besides the difficulties intrinsic to any annotation task dealing with semantics, our annotation scheme involves multiple layers of annotation that are interconnected, adding complexity to the task. Considering the intricacies of our fine-grained semantic annotation, we needed to develop well-documented schemas in order to control the consistency of the annotation, but also to enable an efficient reuse of our annotated corpus. This paper presents the different elements involved in the annotation task, and how the description and the relations between the different linguistic components were formalised and documented, combining schema languages with XML documentation.