Issues of Identity in and across Cultures and Professional Worlds Rome, 25-27 September 2007 Drifts in the priming of An

1. Issues of Identity in and across Cultures and Professional Worlds Rome, 25-27 September 2007 Drifts in the priming of Anglicisms in business communication Sara Laviosa University of Bari saralaviosa@tiscali.it

2. Introducing a new study of Anglicisms whose aim is … • to become clearer about the extent to which translation protects linguistic specificity and cultural difference by resisting the influence of English in professional communication

3. The theoretical framework draws on the convergent similarity among … • Michael Hoey’s (2005, forthcoming) theory of lexical priming • studies of Anglicisms (e.g. Anderman and Rogers 2005) • Gideon Toury’s (1995, 2004) laws of translational behaviour • Christiane Nord’s (2005) theoretical model for translation-oriented text analysis • studies of translation norms (Nord 1991; Toury 1995, 1998; Chesterman 1993, 1997; Hermans 1999)

4. Michael Hoey’s theory of lexical priming • it draws on cognitive psychology and builds upon the work of John Sinclair • it is a lexically-driven theory of language that “would seem to offer a dynamic mechanism for change worthy at least of exploration” (Hoey 2005: 188)

5. Priming in cognitive psychology • a technique that allows one to study the manner by which the interconnections in the human word-store known as the mental lexicon are constructed (Rumelhart and Norman 1985: 29; Aitchison 1987: 24) • a basic priming study consists in presenting subjects with two strings of letters asking them to decide as rapidly as possible whether each is a word or non-word

6. Typical pairs of items are … • nurse plame bread butter bread nurse • if the two words are related the recognition time is significantly shorter than if they are unrelated • the interpretation of this result is that the reading of the first word preactivates the reader’s attention, facilitating the processing of the related word • this preactivation is known as “priming”

7. Lexical priming • the process whereby “[a]s a word is acquired through encounters with it in speech and writing, it becomes cumulatively loaded with the contexts and co-texts in which it is encountered, and our knowledge of it includes the fact that it co-occurs with certain other words in certain kinds of context” (Hoey 2005: 8)

8. while in cognitive psychology the focus is on the relationship between the priming and the primed (or target) word, in lexical priming the focus is shifted towards what is primed, so that “what is primed to occur [in the presence of a priming word] is seen as shedding light upon the priming item” (Hoey 2005: 8)

9. Lexical priming is a mental process • “a posited feature of language acquisition and use […] that is differently actualised by every language user” (Hoey 2005: 14) • “the ‘personal’ corpus that provides a language user with their lexical primings is by definition irretrievable, unstudiable and unique” (ibid.: 14). “All that a [computer] corpus can do is indicate that certain primings are likely to be shared by a large number of speakers” (ibid.: 15)

10. Lexical priming offers an explanation for a considerable number of linguistic features through a series of claims concerning ... • the collocational, semantic, pragmatic, colligational, grammatical and textual primings of every word in the lexis of a language • co-hyponyms and synonyms differ with respect to their collocations, semantic associations and colligations • when a word is polysemous, the collocation, semantic associations and colligations of one sense of the word differ from those of its other senses (Hoey 2005: 15).

11. a drift in the priming of a word, hence a shift in meaning and/or function, occurs when a word is introduced in an unfamiliar context or co-text or if the language user chooses to override its current primings in his/her own use • drifts in the priming of a word, occurring for a number of members of a particular community at the same time, provide a mechanism for temporary or permanent language change

12. A drift in the priming of a word may occur … • when a word migrates from one domain to another in the same language • when the receptor language borrows a word from the donor language (e.g. in bilingual text production) • when a word in the source language is translated with an equivalent word in the target language

13. Objectives • make a contribution to our understanding of the domain-specific and text-type-specific primings of Anglicisms in translational and non-translational business Italian, as well as in English and Italian as donor and receptor languages • become clearer about the nature of translation as a posited potential source of drifts (Hoey forthcoming)

14. A new study of Anglicisms: main features • object of study • descriptive hypotheses • research model and methodology

15. Object of study • lexical primings of Anglicisms in a composite English-Italian comparable and parallel corpus of articles from The Economist and Economy • norms that govern the production of non-translational texts in the receptor language • norms that govern translators’ choices

16. What is a norm? “A regularity in behaviour, together with the common knowledge about and the mutual expectations concerning the way in which members of a group or community ought to behave in certain types of situation” (Hermans 1999: 163)

17. Translational norms • initial norm, preliminary norms, operational norms (Toury 1995: 65-66) • expectancy (or product) norms, professional (or process or production) norms (Chesterman 1993: 9, 1997: 64-70) • constitutive conventions, regulative conventions (Nord 1991: 100-106)

18. Research hypotheses • English loan words in Italian are differently primed from the original English words, hence they shift in meaning across the donor and receptor languages • the translator has the choice of either preserving the primings of the target language or importing the primings of the source language or a mixture of the two • the norms governing translational texts differ from those concerning non-translational texts of the same type

19. Research model and methodology • comparative research model • bilingual comparable corpus • bilingual parallel corpus • monolingual comparable corpus • information about the extratextual factors of the communicative situation (or translating event)

20. Extratextual information • sender, intention, audience, medium, place, time, motive, communicative function of the target text (Nord 2005: 42, 158) • metatexts, e.g. statements and comments made by translators, editors, publishers and other persons involved in the production of the target text (Toury 1995: 65)

21. Corpus analysis & processing tools • identify all the Anglicisms contained in the translational Italian subcorpus, using frequency lists retrieved with the WordList facility provided by WordSmith Tools • analyse the primings of each Anglicism by examining KWIC concordance lines produced by the Concord facility provided by WordSmith Tools

22. Assess the divergent similarity between … • these primings and those contained in the non-translational Italian subcorpus • the primings in the non-translational Italian subcorpus and those in the original English subcorpus • the primings in the translational Italian subcorpus and those in the original English subcorpus so as to identify the translators’ choices (using ParaConc)

23. Conclusion • descriptive corpus studies of translation fully recognize that “[d]escription is not enough. It has to serve a purpose, such as explanation. This requires that phenomena are put into context, and that we have an apparatus to bring that context into view.” (Hermans 1999: 102)

24. Bibliography • Aitchison, Jean (1987) Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell. • Anderman, Gunilla and Rogers, Margaret (eds.), (2005), In and out of English: For Better, for Worse?, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. • Baker, Mona (1993) ‘Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications’, in Mona Baker, Gill Francis and Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds.), Text and Technology: In Honor of John Sinclair, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 233-50. • Chesterman, Andrew (1993) ‘From “Is” to “Ought”: Laws, Norms and Strategies in Translation Studies’, Target 5: 1-20. • Chesterman, Andrew (1996) ‘On Similarity’, Target 8(1), 159-164.

25. Chesterman, Andrew (1997) Memes of Translation. The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. • Chesterman, Andrew (2000) ‘A Causal Model for Translation Studies’, in Maeve Olohan (ed.), Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies 1: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, Manchester: St. Jerome, 15-27. • Chesterman, Andrew (2004a) ‘Where Is Similarity?’, in Stefano Arduini and Robert Hodgson (eds.), Similarity and Difference in Translation. Proceedings of the International Conference on Similarity and Translation, New York, May 31-June 1, 2001, Rimini: Guaraldi, 63-75. • Chesterman, Andrew (2004b) ‘Beyond the Particular’, in Anna Mauranen and Pekka Kujamäki (eds.), Translation Universals: Do they Exist?, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 33-50.

26. Chesterman, Andrew (2006) ‘Similarity analysis and the translation profile’. Paper presented at The International Congress on The Study of Language and Translation - Slt06, 12-14 January, Ghent, Belgium. • Halverson, Sandra (2003) ‘The Cognitive Basis of Translation Universals’, Target 15(2): 197-241. • Hermans, Theo (1999) Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System-oriented Approaches Explained, Manchester: St. Jerome. • Hoey, Michael (2005), Lexical Priming. A new theory of words and language, London and New York: Routledge. • Hoey, Michael (forthcoming), ‘Lexical priming and translation’, in Alet Kruger and Kim Walmach (eds.), Corpus-based Translation Studies: Research and Applications, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

27. Nord, Christiane (1991) ‘Scopos, Loyalty, and Translational Conventions’, Target (3):1, 91-109. • Nord, Christiane (2005) Text Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology, and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. • Rumelhart, David E. and Norman, Donald A. (1985) ‘Representations of Knowledge’, in A.M. Aitkenhead and J.M. Slack (eds.), Issues in Cognitive Modeling, London and Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 15-62.

28. Toury, Gideon (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. • Toury, Gideon (1998) ‘A Handful of Paragraphs on Translation and Norms’, in Christina Schäffner (ed.), Translation and Norms, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 9-31. • Toury, Gideon (2004) ‘Probabilistic Explanations in Translation Studies: Welcome as they are, would they Qualify as Universals?’, in Anna Mauranen and Pekka Kujamäki (eds.), Translation Universals. Do they Exist?, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 15-32.