An intermodal approach to cohesion in constrained and unconstrained language

Abstract

This article investigates cohesion in the spoken and written registers of constrained language varieties to highlight the similarities and differences in the cohesion patterns of mediated (i.e., interpreted and translated) and non-native texts with respect to original texts produced by native speakers. In particular, it examines how different types of cohesive devices are distributed across spoken and written native, non-native, and mediated speeches originally delivered impromptu and read out at the plenary sessions of the European Parliament. The dataset comes from the European Translation and Interpreting Corpus (EPTIC) (Ferraresi and Bernardini 2019). The context provides a rare opportunity to examine the spoken and written registers of professional communication, both mono- and multilingual, in a relatively homogenous setting. First, in the exploratory analysis, I investigate the distribution of different types of cohesive devices across the investigated varieties drawing on mosaic plots and correspondence analysis. Thereafter, I make use of regression modelling of the overall frequency of cohesive devices across the examined varieties to evaluate the effect of constrainedness, mode of delivery, and individual variation. The results indicate that non-native and mediated texts do diverge from native production in the use of cohesive devices, but in different ways.