TIME IS MOTION
A CORPUS-BASED STUDY ON THE
QUANTITATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF
CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS IN TRANSLATED
AND NON-TRANSLATED ENGLISH
Claudia Förster Hegrenæs, Claudia.Hegrenaes@nhh.no
June 21, 2014
Research question
Counting occurences of lexical
expressions of conceptual metaphors,
what does translated English look like
in comparision to non-translated
English?
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Research questions
1. Are there quantitative differences between the
occurrences of metaphorical expressions of the
conceptual metaphor TIME IS MOTION in translated
and non-translated English?
2. What do possible differences look like? Are
metaphorical expressions over- or underrepresented
in translated text compared to non-translated text?
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Methodology I – lexical representation
TIME IS MOTION
target domain TIME
represented as nouns
• time
• day
• evening
• etc.
source domain MOTION
represented as verbs of
motion
• go, goes, went
• run, runs, ran
• walk, walks, walked
• etc.
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Methodology II – corpus search
1. non – translated English:
2. translated English:
British National Corpus (BNC)
Translational English Corpus (TEC)
and
Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA)
corpus search for lemmatized forms [noun] [verb]
Example: [time] [go] = rumour has it he’s getting wilder and wilder as time
goes on (BNC:fict_prose)
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Methodology III – data processing (SPSS)
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Data I
Observed token distribution per corpus
Observed
Corpus
COCA
frequencies
Percent
5570
81.3
BNC
709
10.4
TEC
571
8.3
Total
6850
100.0
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Data II
Cross-tabulation normalized distribution per ten million words for noun/translated
translated
noun
no
yes
time
157.0
39.9
day
121.0
15.9
life
38.0
12.5
night
70.0
10.9
year
40.0
8.8
moment
23.0
8.3
season
4.0
4.8
week
18.0
4.4
morning
11.0
3.3
month
25.0
3.0
evening
21.0
2.8
hour
27.0
2.5
minute
5.0
1.7
end
5.0
1.6
age
1.0
0.8
Sunday
3.0
0.6
future
0
0.4
century
0
0.4
decade
0
0.2
2.0
0.1
May
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Data III
Cross-tabulation normalized distribution per ten million words for verb/translated
translated
verb
yes
no
go
236.0
49.5
come
208.0
49.5
fall
49.0
8.5
run
6.0
4.6
30.0
3.6
roll
7.0
3.2
fly
22.0
2.0
return
10.0
1.0
0
0.4
enter
2.0
0.3
leave
1.0
0.2
travel
0
0.1
jump
0
0.1
arrive
rise
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Data V
Cross-tabulation normalized distribution per ten million words for genre/translated
translated
genre
yes
no
Non-Fiction
102
66
Fiction
469
57
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Data IV
Cross-tabulation normalized distribution for tense/translated
translated
verb form
yes
no
past
389
65
present
161
52
infinitive
21
6
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Results – descriptive analysis
Regarding the four variables noun, verb,
tense and genre, per ten million words
there are more instances of metaphorical
expressions of the conceptual metaphor
TIME IS MOTION in translated English
than in non-translated English.
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Q&A
Förster Hegrenæs, Claudia. "Conceptual metaphors in translation – A corpus based study on
quantitative differences between translated and non-translated English." Metaphor and Intercultural
Communication. Ed. Andreas Musolff, Fiona MacArthur and Giulio Pagani. London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2014.
Förster Hegrenæs, Claudia. TIME IS MOTION. A corpus-based study on the quantitative use of
cognitive metaphors in translated and non-translated English. Thesis. Department of Foreign
Languages, University of Bergen/Norway, 2011. (https://bora-uib-no.pva.uib.no/handle/1956/5349)
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