Colon: functional (a)symmetry between Russian and French

Abstract

The article presents the corpus-assisted research of the functional potential of the colon in the Russian-French language pair. For the data description, a three-part structure was determined. Following that structural model, a contrastive analysis of the colon was performed in order to uncover and then describe its functional potential in the studied language pair, which allowed to solve the following tasks: 1) to calculate the frequency of the colon in the compared languages; 2) to clarify its functional potential there; 3) to identify the zones of functional symmetry and asymmetry. The main information tool is a supracorpora database that stores parallel texts from the Russian National Corpus. It allows for generating the search queries to process the punctuation component in parallel texts. Corpus-based contrastive studies of punctuation are directly related to current challenges i n computer science. They are essential for designing a range of modern AI-based information products, particularly next-generation voice assistants. Additionally, their findings will contribute to improving machine translation technologies. They will aid in calibrating and refining the training of machine translation systems to account for punctuation differences between source and target languages. Moreover, these results will be of use in advancing AI-driven subtitling technologies.

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