adjective-based explicitation. Other cases of multiple shifts occurring in-side a single phrase were treated similarly: Only the hierarchically highest shift was counted.
Note, however, that multiple shifts of different types were not sub-sumed under a single shift. Cf. the following example:
(17) we’re starting to see the benefitsin our results wir sehen die ersten positiven Auswirkungen
In (17), the omission ofin our resultswas counted as two shifts: one inter-actional implicitation (omission ofour) and one denotational implicitation (omission ofresults).6
or exemplifying” and extension as “adding some new element, giving an exception to it, or offering an alternative” (2004: 377). However, it re-mains completely unclear where the difference lies between “specifying in greater detail” and “adding some new element”, for example. A cate-gorization is useless to empirical research if it fails to offer objective criteria for keeping the provided categories apart.
This problem is not specific to Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) classification of semantic relations, but is encountered again and again througout the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics. For example, when classifying linguistic items it often remains unclear whether they belong to the “ideational”, “interpersonal”, or “textual” metafunction of language. The reason is that, again, there are no objective criteria for keeping the three categories apart. This makes it impossible to apply the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics to empirical data in a reli-able way. Halliday and Matthiesen themselves classify countless linguistic items as belonging to one of the three metafunctions of language, but the basis of their decisions often remains unclear. For example, I do not see why the authors assign adverbs such asstillorentirelyto the interpersonal metafunction of language (2004: 128f) – the way I see it, these items have an ideational function.8 (But then, it is not clear what “ideational” means in the first place, since Halliday and Matthiessen fail to provide a precise definition of the concept.)
Given the fundamental problem with the framework of Systemic Func-tional Linguistics noted above, I decided to set up my own framework for identifying and classifying explicitating and implicitating shifts. My framework is loosely based on Halliday’s functional theory of language, but it is (a) more objective and reliable, (b) terminologically precise, and (c) incomplete in the sense that, unlike the Hallidayan framework, it does not aim to be a full-fledged theory of language. The aim of my framework is to be able to identify explicitating and implicitating shifts, and to tell for any given shift whether it mainly affects the interactional, cohesive, or de-notational meaning of the target text as compared to the source text. The framework distinguishes between the following three types of shifts:
1. Interactional shiftsconcern the appearance of the source text author and the target text addressee in the target text (cf. Halliday’s inter-personal metafunction).
2. Cohesive shiftsconcern the cohesion of the target text as compared
8Accordingly, my framework (to be discussed below) classifies shifts involving ad-verbs such asstillorentirelyas denotational shifts.
to the source text (cf. Halliday’s textual metafunction).
3. Denotational shifts concern the description of the states of affairs expressed by the target text (cf. Halliday’s ideational metafunction).
While the three types of shifts roughly correspond to the three Hallidayan metafunctions of language briefly mentioned above, they are more clearly delimited from each other and their range of application is smaller. The downside of this is that unlike Halliday’s metafunctions, my three clas-sificatory types do not cover the whole range of linguistic phenomena.
In other words, there are shifts that fall out of this classification (see Sec-tion 3.8). But since such shifts are rare, this does not have to concern us. It is better to classify 70 or 80 percent of the shifts in a given corpus reliably than 100 percent with errors.
My framework draws heavily on the theory of formal semantics. It departs from the highly simplified – but practically useful – assumption that language is primarily used as a means of representing the world (cf.
Wittgenstein 1921 and any good introduction to formal semantics, e.g.
Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990). A sentence is seen as depicting or representing one or more states of affairs. A state of affairs consists of (a) one or more entities/objects and (b) one or more conditions that are valid of these entities.
For example, the sentenceJan is a studentdepicts a state of affairs where the entityJanis subject to the condition of being a student: student (jan).
More formally, viz. in set-theoretic terms, we might also say that Jan is an element of the set of all students. A slightly more complex example would beJohn loves Mary, where the entity John is subject to the condition of being in love with Mary. More formally, we could say that John is an element of the set of all objects (or persons) that love Mary. From a different perspec-tive, we could call the condition of being in love arelation, since it involves two entities: loves (john, mary).
In the formal-semantic approach to the study of language adopted in this study, a sentence represents a state of affairs by virtue of its subject (typically) denoting a real-world entity, its verb a real-word condition, etc.
A sentence is informative if it puts constraints on what reality could be like. For example, the sentenceFelix is Felixis not informative semantically (maybe pragmatically in certain situations, but that is a different story).
The only information that it provides us with is that an entity named Felix exists. The sentenceFelix is a cat, on the other hand, is highly informative, because it puts strong constraints on what the world could be like. To put it more formally, the sentence constrains the set ofpossible worlds.
The information that Felix is a cat is only the tip of the iceberg. The sentence simultaneously tells us that Felix is not a hamster or a dog, not human, does not study linguistics, etc. In this way, the sentence ex-cludes countless possible states of affairs, or possible worlds. From a formal-semantic perspective, this is what makes a sentence informative (cf. Gamut 1991: 54). We now have a definition of the term informa-tion/informativity – viz. the amount of contraints put on reality by a linguistic message – which is a good thing, because our definitions of explicitness and explicitation rely on this concept (see Section 1.3).
While the view of language sketched above is of course highly sim-plified and incomplete (what about illocutionary force, for example?), it allows a precise and reliable identification of the great majority of explic-itating and implicexplic-itating shifts in translations of expository prose. To see how this works, let us have a look at an example of an explicitating shift from the investigated corpus:
(18) I have challengedthe organizationto double pre-tax earnings in 2000 [. . . ].
Ich habedas Unternehmenaufgefordert, die Einkünfte vor Steuer im Jahre 2000 zu verdoppeln [. . . ].
The term Unternehmen ‘company’ strikes us as more explicit than the source text’s corresponding term organization. Why? Because the set of companies is a proper subset of the set of organizations: a company is an organization, but an organization is not necessarily a company. So, when the term organization in a description of a state of affairs is replaced by the term Unternehmen or company, the set of possible worlds decreases.
As a result, the sentence is more informative and, since the increase in informativity is due to linguistically encoded (verbalized) meaning, also more explicit.
Let us now come back to the three functional types of shifts proposed above. My simple framework can only handle shifts pertaining to the de-scription of states of affairs. That is, all three types of shifts relate to deno-tations of nouns, adjectives, etc. In other words, types 1 and 2 are really subtypes of type 3. Thedenotationof a term is the set of all entities to which it might refer. For example, the denotation of the term catis the set of all cats. It should have become clear that the shifts captured by my classifica-tory framework are all denotational. Interactional and cohesive shifts are nothing more than special cases of denotational shifts. (However, due to their distinct communicative functions, it makes sense to treat them sep-arately.) In the following, I am going to explain how shifts of the three
types discussed above have been identified and classified as explicitations or implicitations in the present study.