1. Introduction

1Various strategies can be deployed in English and Italian to portray the simultaneity, i.e. the partial or total overlap, between two events. Among them, in English, is the use of the subordinators as, while and when, as in (1)1.

2Similarly, Italian may make use of the subordinators come, mentre e quando, which are the most typical translations of the three English lexical items as, while and when, respectively (see 2)2.

3In this paper, we will offer a preliminary comparison of the two triads as/while/when and come/mentre/quando used as simultaneity subordinators. Our aim is threefold, to see (a) whether there are any differences in terms of how the two triads are used in the two languages, (b) how differences in usage may impact on their translation, and (c) what the consequences of our analysis are from a teaching point of view. To pursue these goals, we will be using two very well-known texts, the Italian and English versions of the first installment of the Harry Potter saga, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (henceforth, HP1), and Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose; henceforth, NDR). Obviously, since only two texts are considered here, the present paper offers an exploratory analysis of the issues raised above.

4The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 summarizes previous research into the two triads. Section 3 reports on the original English and Italian data, while Section 4 does so on their translation. Section 5 draws the conclusions and offers some suggestions for future research.

2. Previous research

5Previous research (see e.g. Broccias 2006a, 2006b; Broccias & Smith 2010) has shown that as, while and when exhibit important differences especially when it comes to the event types the three subordinators collocate with. It is sometimes claimed (see Morris 2006) that simultaneity as, unlike while, only combines with ‘multiphase’ events, that is, events whose constitutive parts are different from one another. For example, while As she grew older… is possible with a temporal interpretation, *As she was here… is not, although While she was here… is perfectly acceptable. Still, it is easy to come across counterexamples such as (3), where a ‘monophase’ event is used.

6The event of standing is made up of identical parts and, still, a simultaneity interpretation is available. Nevertheless, it is true that the overwhelming majority of event types collocating with as are of a dynamic nature (see e.g. Broccias 2006a). We will refer to such types as ‘change’ events, be they changes of place or changes of state, see (4a), or (1a) above, and (4b), respectively.

7The crucial point is therefore that as collocates overwhelmingly with change events (whether telic or atelic)3 and, less so, with non-dynamic events (e.g. stand) but does not occur with truly static events (e.g. be). Broccias (2006b) refers to the non-dynamic events as events with a relatively high potential for change, that is, these are events which are susceptible to change (Williams 2002) or, to put it metaphorically, they depict instances of unstable equilibrium. Static events, instead, are events with little potential for change (they are instances of stable equilibrium, metaphorically speaking).

8While and when are more versatile than as in that they can occur with truly static events (e.g. While/When you were here…) and do not exhibit an overwhelming preference for change predicates. Also, when is relatively marginal as a true simultaneity subordinator (see Broccias & Smith 2010) since it often has a sequential interpretation as in (5), where it can be paraphrased, for example, as after. (Such uses are discounted as instances of simultaneity here.)

9Broccias (2006a), who analyses only as and while but not when, captures the difference in their behavior by positing that as is represented in our mental lexicon as a constructional simultaneity subordinator and that while can, instead, be described as a lexical simultaneity subordinator. This means that as requires a temporal ‘exponent’ in the shape of a change event or an event with a high potential for change to be interpreted in temporal fashion; the subordinator while, instead, is listed in our mental lexicon as a temporal subordinator independently of the event it combines with. Clearly, a similar analysis can be extended to when, which can also be described as a lexical temporal subordinator.

10While some research has been carried out into the English triad, little research has been done as regards the Italian simultaneity subordinators from a synchronic point of view (see e.g. Bianco 2009 for a diachronic analysis, which in particular discusses various types of simultaneity in some detail). The main point concerning the expression of simultaneity in Italian, which is also made in GGIC4 (Renzi et al. 2001), is probably the use of the ‘imperfetto’ (‘imperfect’) tense as the default marker of simultaneity in the past (see e.g. Mauroni 2013 and the verbs in the subordinate clauses in (2a-b) and the main clause in (2c) above), rather than the ‘passato remoto’ (‘preterite’), independently of the use of a subordinator. Thus, this study is also a first attempt at filling a gap concerning the description of the differences, if any, between the three Italian simultaneity subordinators come, mentre, and quando.

3. The original data

11This section summarizes the data concerning the occurrences of the two triads extracted from the English version of HP1 and the Italian version of NDR by means of SketchEngine. As the two triads are mostly used in the past in the texts considered here, we only report on past tense occurrences. Both the English and the Italian data were categorized in terms of the predicate appearing in the clause introduced by the simultaneity subordinator and the type of aspect (for English) and tense (for Italian) used.5

3.1. The English data

12Alongside change of place and change of state predicates, the categorization of predicates included other ‘obvious’ groupings emerging from the data, such as predicates involving sound emission, vision, etc., as is illustrated in Table 1 for as, Table 2 for while and Table 3 for when.6 In the case of as, only categories with at least five instances are included in Table 1. The remaining types have been conflated into the category ‘other’, except for cases involving phase verbs, as these are aspectual in nature rather than depicting an event per se. (Percentages have been rounded up to the nearest integer). In the case of the two other subordinators, we provide not only frequencies and percentages for categories with at least five instances, but also for both the categories in Table 1 even when the relevant instances are less than five and the verb be, which is not possible with (temporal) as.

13The findings in the Tables above are in line with what was observed in previous research. First of all, out of the three simultaneity subordinators, as is the favored option at 65%. The overwhelming majority of as examples occurs with change predicates (about 83% of all cases), in particular change of place predicates (79% of all cases). By contrast, change predicates are much less common with while (23% of all cases), which is also found with the verb be (in 9% of all cases); this is an option which, as was remarked above, is not available with as. The versatility of while is manifest in the relatively large proportion of predicates classified as “other” in Table 2, which amount to 31%. When it comes to the subordinator when, two important caveats are in order. Firstly, the majority of when-examples, 36 out 61 examples (or 59% of all when-examples), are actually instances of ‘inverted’ simultaneity, that is, the event depicted by the when-clause is framed by the governing clause event rather than framing it. This is known as ‘cum inverso’ (‘inverted cum’, where cum is the Latin temporal subordinator corresponding to Italian quando) in the Italian literature (see e.g. Bianco 2008) and is illustrated in (6).

14Secondly, the non-inverted examples are seldom clear instances of simultaneity. Consider (7) below:

15The subordinator when might be replaced by as/while (As/While he was leaving…) but could also be interpreted just as a temporal anchoring device, i.e. At the time when… (see Declerk 1997 for an in-depth analysis of when). In this paper, we have decided to err on the side of caution and have thus categorized such examples as instances of simultaneity (but see (5) above for cases which were instead discounted as instances of simultaneity). Nevertheless, the point remains that the ‘main’ (i.e. most frequent) simultaneity use of when appears to be ‘inverted’ simultaneity.

16In both inverted and non-inverted cases, we observe that when is more similar to as than while in the sense that there is a sizeable chunk of change of place occurrences, amounting to more than half of all cases in the inverted type (i.e. 64%) as well as overall (i.e. 40%).

17A final note on the use of aspect is in order. Overall, the use of the progressive is marginal. In fact, there were no progressive examples with when, only two (amounting to 1%) with as and a handful with while (about 20% of all cases), showing that while seems more prone to occur in the progressive than the other two subordinators although, overall, the progressive is little used across the English triad.

3.2. The Italian data

18The findings for the Italian triad in the original version of NDR are summarized in Tables 4 to 6, which also detail the use of the tenses.

19The data suggest that come is marginal, amounting to only 6% of all simultaneity cases, with mentre being the favored option (63% of all simultaneity cases), which confirms our intuition as Italian native speakers that mentre is the most obvious simultaneity subordinator.8 Also, come appears to overwhelmingly prefer the ‘passato remoto’ over the ‘imperfetto’, which means that come-clauses usually depict telic events and that the two simultaneous events (the come-event and the event denoted by the governing clause) are relatively ‘punctual’ rather than extended (or could even be construed as a sequence of events where the event coded by the governing clause immediately follows the event portrayed by the come-clause) as in (8) below:

20The subordinator mentre, like its English counterpart while, is quite flexible in terms of the predicate types it combines with, as the category ‘other’ (at 29%) shows. Change of place verbs are favored (42% of all cases) but not as much as with English as, although the percentage is higher than that for English while. Further, the subordinator mentre is always used with the ‘imperfetto’, which is the simultaneity tense par excellence (see Section 2 above).

21The subordinator quando is also quite common and, at least in NDR, it is interesting to observe that it is used as an ‘inverted’ subordinator less than its English counterpart when (the percentage of inverted cases is 21% in NDR while it is 59% in HP1). Further, like mentre, quando occurs with a variety of predicates (see, in particular, the category ‘other’, which accounts for 29% of all cases). It may be worth of note that the verb essere ‘be’ is mostly found with quando rather than mentre, whereas, in English, it is common with both while and when. Needless to say, these are observations specific to one single Italian text and, hence, further research is needed which makes use of a proper corpus to explore the issues in some detail. As may be expected, simultaneity quando usually occurs with the ‘imperfetto’ (55% of all cases), which is the default tense for portraying an event with a non-negligible temporal extension, and this percentage is even higher (at 69%) when we only consider non-inverted cases. Inverted cases are only found with the ‘passato remoto’, which should come as no surprise since the quando-clause depicts an event framed by the main clause in such instances.

4. The translations

22In this Section we report on the translation of the data from the previous Section. For each subordinator, we give figures for its translations by means of the Italian triad, as well as any other option which includes at least five instances, alongside figures for the category of omitted translations (‘not translated’). For reasons of space, in the Tables below we only provide figures for the use of the tenses in the Italian translation of HP1-when (since its equivalent quando is the subordinator which exhibits most tense variation, see Table 6) and aspect for the English translation of mentre and quando from NDR (since the instances of come are few and far between).

4.1. The Italian translation of HP1

23The Italian translations of the English data are summarized in Tables 7 to 9.

24We have seen in Section 2 above that as is best described as a constructional simultaneity subordinator in that as needs to occur with ‘dynamic’ events, i.e., events that either describe change (of place/state) or that have a very high potential for change in order to be interpreted temporally. Since there is no similar ‘dynamic’ construction in Italian (but see above on the marginal construction with come), it is perhaps little surprising that only about 50% of the examples are translated by means of mentre, which, like its formal equivalent while in English, imposes no restrictions on the event types it combines with. Instead, we observe a wide range of alternatives. Although this is not reported in Table 7, all occurrences of mentre (for English as) are marked for ‘imperfetto’, which is what we should expect based on the discussion in the previous Section.

25Unlike as, while is systematically translated as mentre in the overwhelming majority of cases (75% of all cases). This is to be expected because mentre can function as an equivalent of both while and as so that, at least in theory, there is no particular need to resort to an alternative. Although this is not reported in Table 8, only two cases of mentre (for English while) occur with the ‘passato remoto’, with all the others being marked for ‘imperfetto’.

26As was pointed out above, when is not particularly common as a simultaneity subordinator and, if so, the majority of examples are of the ‘inverted’ type. Since the inverted when/quando simultaneity construction is found in both English and Italian, it is not surprising that the English construction is translated most of the time (69% of all cases) by means of the corresponding Italian construction. We also note that, as expected, the overwhelming majority of such cases (85%) take the ‘passato remoto’, while the percentage of ‘passato remoto’ usage is much lower (at 41%) in the non-inverted type.

4.2. The English translation of NDR

27The English translations of the Italian data are summarized in Tables 7 to 9.

28As we have already remarked, the paucity of come-instances shows that this subordinator, when used as a simultaneity marker, is relatively marginal. Come does evoke a ‘dynamic’ scenario as does English as but it is typically telic (and thus occurring in the ‘passato remoto’), while as may be either telic or atelic. Interestingly, most examples of come are indeed translated by means of as and a few with when, which usually conveys an ‘immediately after’/culminative reading. Still, a larger collection of examples would be needed to reach firmer conclusions. We also need to add that none of the examples are in the progressive (although this is not reported in Table 10).

29The majority of mentre-instances are translated by means of as (60% of all cases), with while being the second favorite option (at 24%). This is perhaps not surprising because the majority of mentre-examples in the text are of a ‘change (of place/state)’ nature (48%, see Table 5 above), which we know is the province of simultaneity as. It is remarkable that, with all three subordinators as/while/when, there is a sizeable number of cases in the progressive, much more so than we would expect on the basis of the English examples, and especially with while. This may be due to the fact that Italian typically uses the ‘imperfetto’ in simultaneity cases and, hence, the translator may have felt, either consciously or unconsciously, the need for a progressive in English to make the imperfective construal explicit.

30Since there is great similarity between Italian quando and English when, it is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of quando examples (84%) are translated by means of when, both in non-inverted and inverted cases (85% and 81%, respectively). We also note that the progressive is sometimes used in the translation of Italian quando, but only in non-inverted cases. This is perhaps another instance of the influence of the Italian ‘imperfetto’ on the translator’s choices. Finally, we observe that a few cases have been translated by means of as, probably because they occur with ‘dynamic’ events.

5. Conclusions: Teaching implications and future research

31We can now provide answers to the three questions posed in Section 1. This paper has shown that the English and Italian ‘simultaneity networks’ are not structured in the same way. The key difference is that there is no constructional equivalent of the English as-construction, although the Italian come-construction is partially similar to it but is restricted to punctual/telic events. This has obvious implications for teaching. Clearly, materials for learners of English should focus on the use of the as-construction by highlighting its combination with events that have a high potential for change, typically change predicates but also unstable states (such as, for example, lying). Instead, the main issue for learners of Italian concerns the use of tenses. In particular, it would be advisable to illustrate the use of the ‘imperfetto’ vs. the ‘passato remoto’ in connection with mentre, which systematically makes use of it. Finally, this study hints at the possible influence of the Italian ‘imperfetto’ on the use of the English progressive in translation. We have observed that, in the English translation of Italian simultaneity clauses, the progressive aspect seems to be much more frequent than in non-translated texts. We have speculated that this may be due to the translator’s either conscious or unconscious attempt at making explicit the imperfective construal, which is typical of simultaneity clauses. This, however, is a tentative conclusion, and we cannot stress enough the need for creating bilingual corpora of contemporary novels to further investigate this issue and the construal of simultaneity more generally.