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The third volume of the series Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics describes current approaches to discourse and translation studies. The chapters in the volume will undoubtedly be useful to scholars interested in translation and discourse analysis, but also to linguists who want to investigate new ways of applying pragmatic theories to the interpretation of new textual domains. For this purpose, the authors have employed a great variety of theories, registers, topics and corpus collection methodologies. The chapters include corpus data and analyses of several languages: English, Spanish, Greek, Chinese, Dutch, Russian, Galician, Swedish and Italian.

The volume is divided into three sections: Current Approaches to Discourse Studies, Current Approaches to Translation Studies, and a third section devoted to the review of recent relevant publications.

The first section, Current Approaches to Discourse Studies, opens with a chapter by Ilka Flöck and Ronald Geluykens entitled ‘Speech Acts in Corpus Pragmatics: A Quantitative Contrastive Study of Directives in Spontaneous and Elicited Discourse’. The study compares the use of directives in three English corpora compiled through different methods: spontaneous spoken data (from the British component of the International Corpus of English), spontaneous written data of business letters, and elicited written data via Discourse Completion Tasks. The results show the existence of significant differences between the three types of corpus data. These differences lie not only in the directive act itself, but also in the accompanying modification strategies, i.e. downgrading and upgrading. Consequently, the resulting speech acts convey different levels of directness. The implications for further research imply the revision of current methodologies, as corpus comparability is influenced by discourse genres and data collection methodologies.

The second chapter, authored by Silvia Molina Plaza, is called ‘Black and White Metaphors and Metonymies in English and Spanish: A Cross-Cultural and Corpus Comparison’. In it, the author presents the metaphoric conceptualizations of black and white, in English and Spanish, based on data drawn from the British National Corpus and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual. The research focuses on the figurative meanings by relating multiword units to their various cultural contexts. Based on Piraiinen’s taxonomy, the author analyses the implied cultural phenomena of the use of these terms qualitatively. The results show that the uses of black/negro representing ‘bad, unhappy’ and of white/blanco representing ‘good, innocent’ seem to be cultural facts in both cultures.

The next chapter, by Georg Marko, is entitled ‘Making Informed Healthy Lifestyle Choices: Analysing Aspects of Patient-Centred and Doctor-Centred Healthcare in Self-Help Books on Cardiovascular Diseases’. The study offers a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analytical approach that examines the relation between doctor-centred and patient-centred elements in self-help books on cardiovascular diseases. The study investigates the speech act of advice as realized by acronyms and imperatives, concluding that self-help health promotion often tends to be doctor-centred rather than patient-centred, which can be considered a contradictio in terminis.

The fourth chapter, authored by Georgia Fragaki and Dionysis Goutsos, has the title ‘Women and Men Talking About Men and Women in Greek’. The study explores the frequency and meaning distinctions of gender-related nouns in Greek for man and woman, and boy and girl. The data for the analysis is drawn from the spontaneous conversations in the Corpus of Greek Texts. The results show that speakers tend to talk about their group members, classified in terms of age and gender. Also, the study proves that Greek women tend to talk about men and women as specific persons, rather than as epitomes of their gender.

The last chapter in this section, by Dana Gablasova and Vaclav Brezina, is entitled ‘Does Speaker Role Affect the Choice of Epistemic Adverbials in L2 Speech? Evidence from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus’. In their work, the authors investigate stance-taking strategies in the context of an examination of spoken English. Specifically, they present the use of epistemic adverbial markers like ‘maybe’, ‘certainly’ and ‘surely’. The authors’ contention is that these markers are not only employed to express speakers’ degree of certainty towards a statement, but also to express speakers’ position towards the addressees. Through the comparison of the expression of epistemic stance by candidates and examiners, the study underlines the importance of considering the pragmatic choices involved in this type of interaction, beyond the labels of ‘native’ or ‘non-native’ speakers of a certain language.

The second section of the volume, Current Approaches to Translation Studies, starts with Richard Xiao’s chapter ‘Source Language Interference in English-to-Chinese Translation’. The author departs from the notion of translational language as a “third code” that differs from both source and target languages. Xiao’s study investigates the “source language shining through” hypothesis by exploring source language interference in translations, at both lexical and grammatical levels. The texts supporting the study are English-to-Chinese translations from comparable and parallel corpora of the two languages. The results of the study of the two genetically distant languages are of critical importance in advocating the source language interference as a translation universal.

The next chapter, by Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez, is entitled ‘From the Other Side of the Looking Glass: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Account of Translating Lewis Carroll’. The author’s intention is to analyse wordplay in the books by Lewis Carroll ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and ‘Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There’. The author avers that the 137 puns identified for the study pose a real challenge for translators, from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective. The study, which follows Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, investigates the techniques used to translate wordplay in six different Spanish versions and in one Galician version. The results of the study show the importance of Relevance Theory in the analysis of translation alternatives of wordplay, and as a tool that opens avenues for future research in pragmatics.

Bart Defranq, Koen Plevoets and Cédric Magnifico contribute to the volume with a chapter entitled ‘Connective Items in Interpreting and Translation: Where Do They Come From?’. Their study presents corpus-based research into the use of connective items by English and Dutch translators and interpreters. The aim of the investigation is to compare the role of connective items in translations and interpretations in relation to source texts. The corpus data is drawn from a corpus of interpretations and translations of the European Parliament. The results show, in the first place, that interpreters and translators differ in their strategies and, secondly, that interpreters omit more connective elements than translators. However, the data shows that interpreters use connective items to make clausal relations explicit and to connect clauses after omissions and to face processing difficulties.

The next chapter is authored by Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij and Ludmila Pöppel, and is entitled ‘Corpus Perspectives on Russian Discursive Units: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Contrastive Analysis’. It analyses a group of Russian discursive units with focus-sensitive semantics such as imenno (just/precisely), kak raz (just/precisely), to-to i ono (that’s just it/the point/problem), to-to i est’ (that’s just it/the point/problem) and to-to i delo (that’s just it/the point/problem). The pragmatic functions of this group of units depend on the dialogic situation and can express agreement, disagreement, doubt, etc. Using relevant lexicographic information and text corpora, including parallel corpora and works of fiction, the authors attempt to clarify the semantic and pragmatic properties of these elements and usage peculiarities of the focus-sensitive discursive units. The authors also illustrate their position with the analysis of the systemic and translational equivalents of these expressions in English and Swedish.

The penultimate chapter, by Silvia Cacchiani, is entitled ‘On Concluders and Other Discourse Markers in the Concluding Moves of English and Italian Historical Research Articles’. The author’s aim is to study genre variation across English and Italian research articles in history with a corpus-assisted approach. In particular, the study concentrates on conclu* and its lemmatizations, i.e., second-level summarizers and concluders, and how they interact with other discourse markers and with metadiscourse across moves. The results indicate that second-level discourse markers add extra meaning to their more general and fewer specific counterparts. In the author’s opinion, variation across English and Italian in this regard can be accounted for following an interpersonal model of metadiscourse characterized by different strategies at the interactional level.

The last chapter of the second section is authored by Raquel Lázaro Gutiérrez and María del Mar Sánchez Ramos. Its title is ‘Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies and Public Service Interpreting and Training: The Case of Interpreters Working in Gender Violence Contexts’. The chapter touches upon a very sensitive issue in our societies, that of violence against women. In order to tackle communication difficulties with foreign victims new mechanisms have been established, like Public Service Interpreting and Translation or Community Interpreting and Translation. The chapter presents a corpus with legal texts and real case interactions that will be used to train interpreters in gender violence contexts in Spain. The authors’ contention is that this specific and delicate type of interpretation demands the accurate understanding of assistance protocols, as well as the key applicable legal terminology and procedures. The corpus data will be essential to understand the language of the victims from an intercultural pragmatic perspective.

The last section of the volume reviews relevant recent books of great interest to pragmaticians and corpus linguists. The first is written by Rachelle Vessey and reviews Zappavigna’s volume (2012) entitled ‘Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Create Affiliation on the Web’. The second review is Elaine Vaughan’s on Aijmer and Altenberg (2013) ‘Advances in Corpus-Based Contrastive Linguistics. Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson’. The last review, written by Keiko Tsuchiya, is on Adolphs and Carter (2013) ‘Spoken Corpus Linguistics: From Monomodal to Multimodal’.