Corpus-based teaching of pragmatics

[EN]This paper is a proposal for teaching pragmatics following a corpus-based approach. Corpora have had a high impact on how linguistics is looked at these days. However, teaching linguistics is still traditional in its scope and stays away from a growing tendency of incorporating authentic samples in the theoretical classroom, and so lecturers perpetuate the presentation of the same canonical examples students may find in their textbooks or in other introductory monographs. Our view is that using corpus linguistics, especially corpora freely available in the World Wide Web, will result in a more engaging and fresh look at the course of Pragmatics, while promoting early research in students. This way, they learn the concepts but most importantly how to later identify pragmatic phenomena in real text. Here, we raise our concern with the methodology, presenting clear examples of corpus-based pragmatic activities, and one clear result is the fact that students learn also how to be autonomous in their analysis o f data. In our proposal, we move from more controlled tasks to autonomy. This proposal focuses on students enrolled in the course Pragmática de la Lengua inglesa, currently part of the curriculum in Lenguas Modernas, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

The third language in English guidebooks and its translation into Spanish

[EN] This article focuses on a specific feature found in tourist guidebooks –the recurrent use of foreign expressions or “third language”. It presents the findings of a comparative analysis of a parallel corpus made up of twenty guidebooks: ten guidebooks originally written in English and their corresponding translated versions in Spanish, describing different countries and cities (all of them published by Lonely Planet), focusing on those chapters in which the writer includes practical information. The purpose of the study is to analyze the use of the third language in the English and Spanish versions and to determine and identify the translation strategies used by the translators to transfer these linguistic elements from one language to the other.