Transitivity-ergativity perspectives on causation in legal texts: A contrastive study of Arabic and English website terms of service

Publication date: Available online 18 December 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Akila Sellami-BakloutiAbstractThe description of grammatical systems of languages constitutes one of the major objectives of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The present study investigates the system of causation in English and Arabic in a contrastive perspective, and aims to show that in addition to typological differences, the lexicogrammatical realisation of causation may be activated by contextual factors. To this end, the instances of causation in three parallel corpora of website Terms of Service (TOS) are explored from transitivity and ergativity perspectives, argued to be complementary. The investigation of the semantics and lexicogrammar of causation shows that lexical, morphological and analytic resources have varying frequencies in the two sub-corpora, reflecting general probabilities in the systems of the two languages. This divergence between the two languages has led to devising separate systems for English and Arabic, in addition to common systems, modifying thus the original system based on the English language (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014). The study also shows that the impact of contextual factors is cross-linguistic, confirming, thus, the higher position of the context stratum. These findings pave the way for more contrastive register-based studies extending to other registers and aiming to enrich SFL theoretical constructs and tools of grammatical descriptions.
Source: Lingua - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research