Translating anaphoric this into Portuguese : a corpus - based study

The paper presents a study on the translation into Portuguese of the demonstrative pronoun this, whenever used as an anaphor. The study relies on the analysis of a sample of tokens collected in a parallel English-Portuguese bilingual corpus containing literary texts and international law texts, as well as technical and scientific materials. Only tokens appearing in texts originally produced in English were considered. Each case of anaphoric this was classified according to four properties, namely: syntactic function; reference type (anaphoric, cataphoric or deictic), according to the relation each token holds with the antecedent; explicitness of the antecedent; and antecedent phrase structure. Explicitness assigns the values of either explicit or implicit to antecedents of anaphoric this tokens, as identified by the analyst, whereas phrase structure classifies those antecedents as either nominal – a noun phrase – or textual – a discourse chunk that cannot be treated as a single noun phrase. Relations between these variables are analysed with a view to revealing semantic relations of a textual nature, and renderings into Portuguese are also discussed so as to establish the way these relations are expressed by means of anaphora in each language. Collocational analysis of the tokens was used to establish patterns of translation for the anaphor in the English-Portuguese language pair. The study attempts to show that the anaphoric demonstrative this plays a particularly important role in the definition of patterns for textual semantics in English, and that corresponding patterns in Portuguese branch out over a range of forms which may be predicted using the analytical framework proposed. It is