Structural effects of English-German language contact in translation on concessive constructions in business articles

Abstract

Studies on a variety of languages have observed a shift away from/nhypotactic, hierarchical structures towards paratactic, incremental structures,/nand have attributed this to language contact with English in translation. This/npaper investigates such a shift towards parataxis as the preferred structure of/nconcessive constructions in German business articles. To this effect, a diachronic/ncorpus method that has been applied to popular science articles in existing/nstudies is adopted and applied to business articles, in an attempt to reproduce/nexisting findings for this genre. This method is complemented by a corpus of/nmanuscripts which allow to control for the effect of editing on the translated/ntexts. Based on the analysis of hypotactic and paratactic translations of English/nconcessive conjunctions between 1982/83 and 2008, I argue that hypotactic/nstructures are indeed used less frequently in translated texts, but that this/ndevelopment is restricted to translated language. In non-translated texts, the/nuse of hypotactic conjunctions has increased. The use of sentence-initial conjunctions,/nhowever, does seem to spread in this genre (as was reported for/npopular science), which may be further evidence for it to be a case of language/nchange through contact in translation.