SugarTexts
Telling the SugarStory 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 Loc1 to Loc2”
Suggested terms:
Relocation  Relocation Verbs
Smith (2003: 71ff; 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

Manner (or: satellite-framed) vs. Path (or: verb-framed) languages
Talmy (1985, 2000); Slobin (2004a/b); Mora Gutiérrez (2001); Berthele (2004)

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 SugarTexts Corpus
provides an empirical basis for shedding new light
on these and other dimensions
The SugarTexts 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 PhD student in collaboration with senior researchers at CBS
Status: English: 17 texts, Italian: 15 texts, French: 26 texts, Spanish: 17
texts, Danish: 17 texts, 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 SugarTexts material:

Real-life texts produced by text writers simply doing their job

Immediate intelligibility to non-specialists and “fairy-tale appeal”

Path & Manner of motion change and combine in numerous
ways throughout the process

The process media are affected and evolve along the process
which further differentiates their motion potential

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 SugarWorld 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)
 may be further specified linguistically in terms of Loc1  Loc2
 Path
Examples: arrive
enter

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; 2005a
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’] SugarText_DA 9
Italian:
Il sugo leggero passa alla stazione di evaporazione [...]
SugarText_IT 1
Danish: Roerne glider direkte ind i en langstrakt beholder, roevasken
[‘The beets slide directly into an elongated container, the beet
washer’] SugarText_DA 3
Italian:
Le bietole, unitamente all’acqua di trasporto, entrano nelle lavatrici
SugarText_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 SugarTexts context
And we might even crystallize some
new ideas today
Everyone is invited!
Project status:

Text collection and “straining” almost completed

Texts used by colleagues and students for exploring verb
typologies, anaphors, nominal lexicalization patterns etc. (a few
articles and 4 master theses)
Next steps:

Making the corpus publically available on www.sugartexts.dk
with additional multimedia ScienTainment facilities, serving as a
forum for interested researches

SugarTexts Symposium with Proceedings

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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