Valency sentence patterns and meaning interpretation: case study of the verb 'consider'

TLDR: This thesis explores the interrelationship of local grammar, meaning, and translation equivalence of the English verb CONSIDER, compared in a monolingual study with its near-synonyms BELIEVE, FEEL and THINK, and in a contrastive analysis with their German translation equivalents.

Abstract: This thesis explores the interrelationship of local grammar, meaning, and translation equivalence, using a case study of the English verb CONSIDER, compared in a monolingual study with its near-synonyms BELIEVE, FEEL and THINK, and in a contrastive analysis with their German translation equivalents. The methodology fuses corpus linguistics and valency grammar, analysing and comparing monolingual and parallel corpora. Corpus investigation is found to be a reliable tool in identifying key translation equivalents and in verifying sentence patterns. Valency theory is argued to be more successful than related approaches in distinguishing between different levels of language analysis. Its flexibility regarding complement categorisation types make it possible to define categories that can be applied to both German and English appropriately in a contrastive study, in spite of the surface differences between the two languages. The findings highlight the problems of investigating the interplay of lexis and grammar in a contrastive context, and indicate that from the perspective of translation, language is much less rule-based and less phraseological than is often assumed. Applications of the research to the field of bilingual lexicography are discussed. Based on the corpus analysis and the valency analysis some sample dictionary entries are proposed.