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Many thanks,
Cinthya Oliveira, Dana Lungu, Sinan Richards
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[apologies for cross-posting]

Dear all,
The Graduate Forum at the Institute of Modern Languages Research  hosts its seminar session on Thursday 17th November, 2016, at 18:00-19:30 in Room 246, Senate House, London. The Forum is a great opportunity for postgraduates across languages and universities to come together and support each other's research.
 
Our session will feature presentations on Linguistic Genericity  and  Translation, by Sascha Stollhans (Manchester) and Jenny Harris (Cambridge)
 
We hope to see you there!
Cinthya Oliveira, Dana Lungu, Sinan Richards
IMLR Graduate Forum Co-ordinator 2015/2016

Jenny Harris, University of Cambridge - 'Benjamin and the Broken Vessels: Imagining a fragmented future for translation'

At the heart of Walter Benjamin's influential essay on translation, The Task of the Translator, there is a metaphor of fragmentation:
Just as fragments of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to each other in the tiniest details but need not resemble each other, so translation, instead of making itself resemble the meaning of the original, must lovingly, and in detail, fashion in its own language a counterpart to the original's mode of intention, in order to make both of them recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language.(Benjamin trans. Steven Rendall, TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 10, n° 2, 1997, p. 161.)
This paper seeks to explore the implications of this metaphor, and by doing so tease out Benjamin's future-oriented view of translation. For Benjamin, this vase is not the object of a nostalgic longing, nor a melancholy of the picturesque. Rather it is the site of labour, specifically by translators, making parts that will fit together to form a vase in the future. I intend to trace a line in the preoccupation with fragments that passes through Jena romanticism, where Schlegel considered fragments to be supremely important, but wrote that they must be 'entirely isolated from the surrounding world'. In order to consider Benjamin's modernist reception of these ideas, I will examine the theological perspectives contained in the essay by reading this and other metaphors through the lens of the Jewish mysticism which so fascinated him. The broken vessel, indeed, relates to a story in the Kabbalah. Rabbi Isaac Luria, a mystic known as the father of modern Kabbalah, writing in the 16th century, has a story about ten vessels containing divine light at the creation of the world. On their way to earth, the vessels were broken and sparks or shards of light were scattered all over the earth. The mission of the Jewish diaspora, therefore, is to gather these sparks because when enough of them are gathered together the world will be redeemed by the coming of the Messiah. As this paper will explicate, Benjamin offers a mode of engagement with fragments of the past which is future oriented,
 potentially optimistic and based in a theory of translation shot through withthe theological notion of redemption.

Sascha Stollhans (Manchester): 'Dinosaurs are extinct and Brits love tea...?' On Linguistic Genericity in English, French and German, and its Implications for Language Acquisition

 

Genericity is the way in which we refer to a general fact, a habit, a group, kind or collective. When we make statements such as "Dinosaurs are extinct.", "Brits love tea." (apologies for the rather shameless use of a stereotype, but linguistically speaking this is a great example!), we are not talking about any specific dinosaurs, Brits or tea, but we are rather referring to generic groups thereof.

In this paper, I will present some initial results of a cross-linguistic analysis of English, French and German generic noun phrases, focussing specifically on the selection of articles. I will focus on three sub-groups of generics (cf. Krifka et al. 1995):


(1) Kind-referring noun phrases, ie. noun phrases which do not “refer to an ‘ordinary’ individual or object, but instead […] to a kind” (Krifka et al., 1995, p. 2):

a. Dinosaurs are extinct.

b. Dinosaurier sind ausgestorben.

c. Les dinosaurs ont disparu.


(2) Characterising sentences, in which genericity is a feature of the sentence as a whole:

a. Brits love tea.

b. Briten lieben Tee.

c. Les Britanniques aiment le thé.


(3) Kind-denoting objects, which can be subsumed as kind-referring noun phrases; however, due to the different nature of the verbs with which they tend to occur (i.e. verbs from the semantic field of (dis)liking), they permit exceptions. In French, kind-denoting objects always require the definite article, whereas in English and German a generic interpretation requires the use of no article:

a. Brits love tea.

b. Briten lieben Tee.

c. Les Britanniques aiment le thé.

Genericity presents a challenge even for advanced learners of a foreign language. Despite the structural similarity, this also seems to be the case for native English speakers of German. To date, there are very few studies dealing with the second language acquisition and hardly any focusing on the third language acquisition of generics. I will conclude by presenting an idea for an experimental study design seeking to fill this gap.

 

Reference:

KRIFKA, MANFRED, FRANCIS PELLETIER, GREGORY N. CARLSON, ALICE TER MEULEN, GODEHARD LINK, and GENNARO CHIERCHIA, 1995. Genericity: An Introduction. In: CARLSON, GREG N., and FRANCIS PELLETIER eds., The Generic Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1-124