Monday, April 06, 2015

Another reason word-for-word translation doesn't work

Since distance from the deictic centre is a cognitive matter, it will also be culturally and psychologically determined. What is relatively close in the culture may be relatively distant in another; what is relatively familiar to one person may be relatively unfamiliar to another. Distance in pragmatic space is thus a feature of the culturally and psychologically defined cognitive word of natural language users.— The Theory of Functional Grammar Part 1, The Structure of the Clause, page 37

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