Introduction

Abstract

What exactly is the difference between watching and looking, and is it the same as that between hearing and listening? How does a translator deal with the fact that French distinguishes between savoir and connaître, and German between wissen and kennen, where English has only one word, to know, for both? And how can it be explained that English and German reverse the assignment of content to verb and adverb in sentence pairs like Tom likes to swim / Tom schwimmt gern (‘Tom swims likingly’)? In linguistics, questions of this kind are examined under the heading lexical semantics: the study of the meaning of individual words, and of the relations between different senses and between similar words. One fruitful and illuminating means of studying word meaning is contrastive studies, where similar words in different languages are compared with respect to their syntax and meaning. Here, one keeps running into cases where on first sight two words appear to mean the same, and any dictionary lists them as translations, yet each has subtle shades of meaning causing them to differ in certain situations—in which they should not be used as translation-equivalent. For instance, for the German word Sympathie dictionaries give the straightforward translation sympathy; but since the English word is ambiguous, it is a fallacy to translate für jemanden Sympathie haben literally as to have sympathy for someone, which corresponds to the German Mitleid mit jemandem haben.