Abstract

This article defends that the restricted distribution of strong pronouns in the pivot position of Catalan existential sentences is not a consequence of the Definiteness Effect, as commonly assumed, but rather of the conjunction of the information conditions imposed by the existential sentence, which requires the pivot to be contrastive, with the pragmatic nature of contrast in the pronominal system, which blocks the contrastive reading of pronouns in precisely this position. Henceforth, it is argued that pronominal pivots can only obtain the required contrastive reading by external means, namely by means of the particles només ‘only’ and mateix ‘same’. This analysis is extended to languages respecting the Definiteness Effect, as English or Spanish.

Abstract

This work analyses the translation of italicized contrastive foci (CF) in an English to Catalan translation corpus containing six novels. It focuses on term focus occurrences, (Zimmermann 2016), i.e., focused complements, adjuncts and linking words. The main goals are to determine how English-Catalan translators regard and tackle italicized CF, as well as to class and quantify possible equivalent translations. Furthermore, several hypotheses will be put forward to account or 1) low CF marking (below 50%) in Catalan target texts; 2) small frequency of Catalan CF markers such as focus preposing (Bonet & Solà 1986) and focus adverbs and particles (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998; Beck 2016), and (3) the existence of two pragmastylistic trends concerning CF in situ marking with italics.