Translation correspondences of digressive discourse markers in English and Spanish: A corpus-based study

Abstract

The present study is work-in-progress in the context of a larger project aimed at the creation of a bilingual (English-Spanish) corpus annotated with discourse markers (DMs) as part of the activities derived from the Textlink Cost Action. Focusing on two of the most frequent digressive discourse markers (DDMs) in English –by the way and incidentally- and their Spanish counterparts –por cierto and a propósito –as a case study, the paper addresses the following research questions: is it possible to construct semantic fields of DDMs in English and Spanish on the basis of their translation correspondences? Is it possible to establish core and non-core meanings? Four parallel corpora are used for the study: the MULTINOT corpus (Lavid et al. 2015), the EUROPARL corpus (Koehn 2005), the OPUS2 Corpus and the OPEN Subtitles Corpus (Tiedemann 2009). The analysis reveals that these DDMs are semantically underspecified and have a large number of different translations which can be grouped into semantic fields on the basis of their closeness of meaning. It also shows that translations can make explicit certain meanings which are less obvious from a monolingual syntagmatic analysis. It is expected that the methodology and the results of this analysis can be useful for contrastive and translation research on discourse markers as well as for the bilingual annotation of parallel corpora for computational tasks.