Sugar Texts Telling the Sugar Story in 6

Sugar. Texts Telling the Sugar. Story in 6 Indo-European languages: What may and what must be conveyed? Viktor Smith, Copenhagen Business School vs. ikk@cbs. dk “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” Roman Jakobson (1959: 236) Lingue e culture europee: tipologie a confronto, Cagliari, 13 -14 novembre 2007

Project focus (at least initially) Conceptualization, lexicalization, and verbalization of “moving, or being moved, from Loc 1 to Loc 2” Suggested terms: Relocation Verbs Smith (2003: 71 ff; 2005) Basic assumptions: The cognitive mechanisms involved appear to be universal The linguistic means available for communicating their products display profound and systematic crosslinguistic differences

Systematic crosslinguistic differences also dividing the Indo-European Language Family Example: Danish Italian hunden gik/løb ind il cane fisken svømmede ind il pesce fuglen fløj ind l’uccello bilen kørte ind la macchina skibet sejlede ind la nave entrò

Typological frames of explanation q Manner (or: satellite-framed) vs. Path (or: verb-framed) languages Talmy (1985, 2000); Slobin (2004 a/b); Mora Gutiérrez (2001); Berthele (2004) q Endocentric vs. Exocentric languages Herslund (2000); Herslund & Baron (2003); Korzen (2005) Growth points for continued research • Refining and differentiating the typological description of particular languages • Assessing the impact of typological differences on crosslinguistic communication and translation • The language worldview & “thinking for speaking” dimensions The Sugar. Texts Corpus provides an empirical basis for shedding new light on these and other dimensions

The Sugar. Texts Corpus Multilingual text corpus containing authentic step-by-step descriptions of the processing of sugar beets into refined white sugar in a sugar factory, as found in textbooks, technical research reports, information folders, encyclopedias, sales material, on websites, etc. That is: Spontaneous verbalizations of uniform extralinguistic scenarios containing a wide variety of relocation processes and events in terms of both Path and Manner of motion Collected and screened by the joint effort of 8 master thesis students and 1 Ph. D student in collaboration with senior researchers at CBS Status: English: 17 texts, Italian: Italian 15 texts, French: French 26 texts, Spanish: Spanish 17 texts, Danish: Danish 17 texts, German: German 32 texts, Russian: 13 texts.

Related approaches Frog Stories The Mr. Bean Project Berman & Slobin 1994; Strömquist & Verhoeven 2004 Skytte et al. 1999

Virtues of the Sugar. Texts material: l Real-life texts produced by text writers simply doing their job l Immediate intelligibility to non-specialists and “fairy-tale appeal” l Path & Manner of motion change and combine in numerous ways throughout the process l The process media are affected and evolve along the process which further differentiates their motion potential l Realistic basis for testing the impact of typological differences on crosslinguistic communication: Translating technical process descriptions is a real-life challenge to thousands of translators! Text categorization: A, B & C texts depending on the intended reader’s expected degree of special knowledge

What we see. . . But how is it conceptualized and verbalized?

The Sugar. World Ontology WASHING beets DIFFUSION SLICING cosettes PURIFICATION crude juice thin juice EVAPORATION soil pulp filter cake CENTRIFUGATION sugar crystals massecuite molasses steam CRYSTALLIZATION thick juice steam

The ontology involves a wide variety of Actions involving a change of location in terms of presence or absence of a Figure on a particular Ground (Location) l may be further specified linguistically in terms of Loc 1 Loc 2 Path Examples: arrive enter l Activities involving unstable Figure-Ground relationships on one and the same Ground (Location) may be further specified linguistically in terms of Figure Ground interaction and compatibility (+ impact of Agent, for transitive verbs) Manner Examples: roll soak throw For further details on the semantic metalanguage: See Smith 2003; 2005 a

Different languages present these variables in different ways A first taste: Danish: Tyndsaften pumpes til fordampestationen, hvor saften koncentreres [‘The thin juice is pumped to the evaporation station where the juice is concentrated’] Sugar. Text_DA 9 Italian: Il sugo leggero passa alla stazione di evaporazione [. . . ] Sugar. Text_IT 1 Danish: Roerne glider direkte ind i en langstrakt beholder, roevasken [‘The beets slide directly into an elongated container, the beet washer’] Sugar. Text_DA 3 Italian: Le bietole, unitamente all’acqua di trasporto, entrano nelle lavatrici Sugar. Text_IT 4 More examples will follow in subsequent talks by my CBS colleagues

Still: What we present today does not exhaust the range of linguistic phenomena and questions that are currently being explored and could be explored in a Sugar. Texts context And we might even crystallize some new ideas today Everyone is invited!

Project status: l Text collection and “straining” almost completed l Texts used by colleagues and students for exploring verb typologies, anaphors, nominal lexicalization patterns etc. (a few articles and 4 master theses) Next steps: l Making the corpus publically available on www. sugartexts. dk with additional multimedia Scien. Tainment facilities, serving as a forum for interested researches l Sugar. Texts Symposium with Proceedings l Development of electronic sugar processing dictionary with additional language and knowledge management tools incorporationg research results gained

Thank you for your attention!

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