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.noJune 21, 2014

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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 source domain MOTION

represented as nouns• time• day• evening• etc.

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:

British National Corpus (BNC)

and

Corpus of Contemporary American

English (COCA)

2. translated English:

Translational English Corpus (TEC)

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

Corpus

Observed

frequencies Percent

COCA 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

nountranslated

yes no

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

May 2.0 0.1

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Data IIICross-tabulation normalized distribution per ten million words for verb/translated

verbtranslated

yes no

go 236.0 49.5

come 208.0 49.5

fall 49.0 8.5

run 6.0 4.6

arrive 30.0 3.6

roll 7.0 3.2

fly 22.0 2.0

return 10.0 1.0

rise 0 0.4

enter 2.0 0.3

leave 1.0 0.2

travel 0 0.1

jump 0 0.1

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Data V

Cross-tabulation normalized distribution per ten million words for genre/translated

genre

translated

yes no

Non-Fiction 102 66

Fiction 469 57

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Data IVCross-tabulation normalized distribution for tense/translated

verb form

translated

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)