Lexicography and Lexicology Reading Group, May 16, 5 pm, 101A

The focus of this presentation is the English phrasal verb – a peculiar union of a verb and a particle (prepositional or adverbial) that often produces a unique meaning, uninferable from the meanings of its constituents. This semantic unpredictability of phrasal verbs (PVs) along with their specific syntactic configurations, poses major problems for the non-native speakers who often consciously choose to avoid using the structures and instead fall back on the synonymous, “safer”, Latinate verbs (MacArthur 1989). Adding to the comprehension difficulties is the often stressed informal and colloquial character of phrasal verbs. The widespread conviction that PVs are typical of unofficial discourse contributes to their “pedagogical notoriety” but, at the same time, convinces learners that mastery of phrasal verbs (along with idioms) is the key to achieving the much-desired, native-like command of English. The features described above add up to a vivid picture of a lexical item so concise in form, yet complex in content. It is no surprise that phrasal verbs constitute a problematic group for both bilingual lexicographers and translators. However, contrastive translation studies on these structures are still rare (e.g. Masiulanis 1974; Claridge 2002; Aldahesh 2009; Dezortová 2010).
       To analyze how phrasal verbs are translated into Polish, an English-Polish unidirectional parallel corpus, PHRAVERB, of 926,725 words in both languages, has been created. The corpus consists of 408 English press articles (95% from American newspapers, 5% from British newspapers) and their translations published on three major Polish internet news portals between 2006 and 2010.
        As many as 602 different PVs have been identified in a total of 2,514 occurrences. 56% of PVs found in the corpus have been translated using lexicographic equivalents found in the leading English-Polish (E-P) general-purpose dictionaries. In 13% of the cases the phrasal verb was omitted in translation while the remaining 30% have been rendered using non-lexicographic equivalents thus serving as examples of translators’ creativity. The paper looks at selected examples of corpus-generated equivalents in terms of their accuracy and possible eligibility for inclusion in future E-P dictionaries. Additionally, 40 sentences from PHRAVERB have been selected for translation by 55 students to see how the equivalents produced by them correspond to those found in the corpus. As expected, students had difficulty in finding the right translation for some of the PVs, which is why a parallel corpus like PHRAVERB might serve a didactic purpose in translator training and English language acquisition.

References :
Aldahesh, A.Y. (2009), Translating idiomatic English phrasal verbs into Arabic. A contrastive linguistic study. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller.
Claridge, C. (2002), ‘Translating phrasal verbs.’ In Kettemann, B. & Marko, G. (eds.), Teaching and learning by doing corpus analysis. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 361-373.
Dezortová, J. (2010), Phrasal verbs and their translations into Czech. A corpus-based study. [Unpublished M.A. thesis, Masaryk University]. 
McArthur, T. (1989), ‘The long-neglected phrasal verb.’ English Today 18, 4: 38-44.
Masiulanis, J. (1974), English phrasal verbs and their Polish equivalents: A contrastive study with pedagogical implications. [Unpublished M.A. thesis, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań.].

The presentation is a report on the second part of a major study that aims to verify the defining styles that native speakers of English employ when asked to spontaneously define words. The spontaneous responses are compared with definitions in dictionaries to check whether lexicographers could draw upon folk defining techniques to write more user-friendly definitions. The study was divided into two main parts based on written and spoken elicitation. In the Spontaneous Defining Spoken Task (SDST) - native speakers of English, mostly younger adults, university students were asked to provide definitions for several items within a limited amount of time. The distractors were discarded and the nine tested nouns (abstract and concrete) were analyzed. The responses constitute a database, each response classified into defining styles according to the length/complexity and the style of the response in terms of grammar and semantics. The classifications were also analyzed quantitatively. The distribution of different defining styles was investigated. The results were compared with the written part as well as some previous studies conducted on native speakers of Polish. The analysis showed that there is one major, universal and common defining style characteristic of both the English and the Polish culture.