Local grammar and translation equivalents-Preliminary findings for consider and its german translations Renate Reichardt University of birmingham Abstract: The premise of this paper is that the local grammar of words, specifically their syntactic valency complements, guides the choice of translation equivalents. the hypothesis is that the preferred translation equivalent of a word is the one which is closest to the valency pattern of the original word. Valency theory is concerned with the local grammar of words, i.e. with the property of a word to combine with a certain number of elements in forming larger units(Emons 1974).A corpus linguistic approach was chosen for the exploration of the relationship between the valency patterns of a word and its corresponding meaning in another exe languages English and German were investigated, but the approach is equally suitable to explore the grammar-lexis interplay between a wide range of languages. The case study examines the polysemous verb CONSIDER and its German equivalents. Frequency analysis showed a preference of the syntactic valency patterns of CONSIDER for certain translation equivalents. Valency patterns are thus a useful indicator of likely translations into another language, a finding which can be useful in the second language classroom in translation training or in the compilation of dictionaries and grammars. On hand, the contrastive analysis has also shown that there is great overall flexibility in the choice of translation equivalents, which illustrates that what is often considered a straightforward rule-based construction process is much more flexible and unpredictable 1. Assumptions and methods ed by Firth(1957) and Sinclair(1991), who argued that meaning depends on the environment in which a word occurs. The purpose of this investigation is to explore the lexis-grammar interface from a contrastive perspective. Focusing on the local grammar of words, i.e. their syntactic valency patterns, a corpus investigation into the polysemous verb CONSIDER and its German translation equivalents is undertaken lI Meaning, paraphrase and translation Any language is based on conventions amongst its users. Words do not in themselves carry an inherent meaning, but the meaning, usually expressed as a paraphrase, is negotiated in the discourse and thus acquired by language users(Teubert 2004). In contrastive linguistics the paraphrase expressing the meaning of a word is the chosen translation equivalent. This study differs from similar stud ies(e.g. Duffner et al. 2009; Noel 1996)in that translation equivalents are established from a multilingual corpus (EuroParl), rather than being taken from existing dictionaries or being based on monolingual meaning interpretations1 Local grammar and translation equivalents - Preliminary findings for CONSIDER and its German translations Renate Reichardt University of Birmingham Abstract: The premise of this paper is that the local grammar of words, specifically their syntactic valency complements, guides the choice of translation equivalents. The hypothesis is that the preferred translation equivalent of a word is the one which is closest to the valency pattern of the original word. Valency theory is concerned with the local grammar of words, i.e. with the property of a word to combine with a certain number of elements in forming larger units (Emons 1974). A corpus linguistic approach was chosen for the exploration of the relationship between the valency patterns of a word and its corresponding meaning in another language. For exemplification the languages English and German were investigated, but the approach is equally suitable to explore the grammar-lexis interplay between a wide range of languages. The case study examines the polysemous verb CONSIDER and its German equivalents. Frequency analysis showed a preference of the syntactic valency patterns of CONSIDER for certain translation equivalents. Valency patterns are thus a useful indicator of likely translations into another language, a finding which can be useful in the second language classroom, in translation training or in the compilation of dictionaries and grammars. On the other hand, the contrastive analysis has also shown that there is great overall flexibility in the choice of translation equivalents, which illustrates that what is often considered a straightforward rule-based construction process is much more flexible and unpredictable. 1. Assumptions and methods The research is inspired by Firth (1957) and Sinclair (1991), who argued that meaning depends on the environment in which a word occurs. The purpose of this investigation is to explore the lexis-grammar interface from a contrastive perspective. Focusing on the local grammar of words, i.e. their syntactic valency patterns, a corpus investigation into the polysemous verb CONSIDER and its German translation equivalents is undertaken. 1.1 Meaning, paraphrase and translation Any language is based on conventions amongst its users. Words do not in themselves carry an inherent meaning, but the meaning, usually expressed as a paraphrase, is negotiated in the discourse and thus acquired by language users (Teubert 2004). In contrastive linguistics the paraphrase expressing the meaning of a word is the chosen translation equivalent. This study differs from similar studies (e.g. Duffner et al. 2009; Noël 1996) in that translation equivalents are established from a multilingual corpus (EuroParl), rather than being taken from existing dictionaries or being based on monolingual meaning interpretations