Resumen de YES and NO: universal ideas in language specific configurations
Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij, Irina Levontina
Even the most general and seemingly universal ideas have a unique representation in every single language. In this paper, we analyze the Russian words da "yes" and hem "no", as well as their English and German correlates. We show that these words behave differently from language to language. As empirical basis, we took two Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) and their German and Russian translations. Many of the cross-linguistic differences discussed in the paper go back to the language specific properties of the discourse structure.
