Predication Transformation: A parallel corpus-based study of Russian verbless sentences and their English translations

Antonina Bondarenko

Abstract


The paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the predication involved in the translation of verbless sentences from Russian to English based on a pilot parallel corpus con­sisting of Dostoyevsky’s dialogue-based Russian Brat’ ja Karamazovy (1880) and the Pevear and Volokhonsky English translation The Brothers Karamazov (1990). In contrast to English, known for its dependency on the finite verb phrase, Russian permits the use of verbless sentences more productively than any other Indo-European language (McShane, 2000; Kopotev, 2007). Combining the parallel-text approach to contrastive linguistics developed by Guillemin-Flescher (2003) with a new method of automatic verbless sentence extraction, the present study examines reoccurring patterns regarding the way that predication is gained or lost in translation. Following automatic segmentation, morphosyntactic annotation and extraction, verbless sentences and their translation correspondences are manually annotated for verbal and non-verbal predication in accordance with Hengeveld’s (1992) definitions. The results present a typology of a phenomenon we call ‘predication transformation’, in which translation correspondences are transformed in terms of predication type. Quantitative results reveal the rate at which verbs are gained in translation of the verbless sentences from Russian to English, as well as the predication verbalization rate. We argue that a verb-centric notion of semantic predication is not cross-linguistically stable.


Keywords


verbless sentences; parallel corpora; predication; English; Russian

Full Text:

PDF

References


Benveniste, E. (1971). Problems in General Linguistics. (M. E. Meek, Trans.). Miami: University of Miami Press, (original work published 1966).

Fleury, S. & Zimina, M. (2014). Trameur: A framework for annotated text corpora exploration. In: L. Tounsi & R. Rak (eds.), Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, August 2014, Dublin, Ireland (pp.57–61). Http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C14-2013.pdf; hal-01223725 (10.01.2018).

Guillemin-Flescher, J. (2003). Théoriser la traduction. Revue française de linguistique appliquée, 8(2), 7–18.

Hengeveld, K. (1992). Non-Verbal Predication: Theory, Typology, Diachrony. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP.

Kopotev, M. (2007a). What a difference a verb makes! Russian and Finnish verbless sentences. In: M. Nenonen & S. Niemi (eds.), Collocations and Idioms 1: Papers from the First Nordic Conference on Syntactic Freezes, Joensuu, 20 (pp.177–192). Joensuu: Joensuu yliopisto.

Kopotev, M. (2007b). Where Russian Syntactic Zeros Start: Approaching Finnish?, Slavica Helsingiensia, 32, 116–137.

Kopotev, M. (2015). Reconstruction and Idiomaticity: The origin of Russian verbless clauses reconsidered. Folia Linguistica Historica, 36(1), 219–243.

Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form : Topic, Focus and the Mental Representation of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: CUP.

Landolfi, A., Sammarco, C. & Voghera, M. (2010). Verbless clauses in Italian, Spanish and English: A Treebank annotation. In: S. Bolasco, I. Chiari & L. Giuliano (eds.), JADT 2010: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Statistical Analysis of Textual Data (pp. 1187–1194). Rome: CISU.

Merle, J.-M. (ed.). (2009). Faits de Langues: La Prédication, 31–32, 1–462.

McShane, M. (2000). Verbal ellipsis in Russian, Polish and Czech. The Slavic and East European Journal, 44(2), 195–233.

Novakova, I. & Guentchéva, Z. (eds.). (2008). Revue de linguistique et de didactique des langues: Syntaxe et Sémantique des Prédicats, 37, 1–199.

Stassen, L. (2013). Zero copula for predicate nominals. In: M. S. Dryer, & M. Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved from http://wals.info/chapter/120 (access: 22.08.2018).

Stolz, T. (2007). Harry Potter meets Le Petit Prince: On the usefulness of parallel corpora in crosslinguistic investigations. STUF-Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, 60(2), 100–117.

Thomas, G. (1982). Aspects of the study of Dostoyevsky’s vocabulary. The Modern Language Review, 77(3), 670–678.

Vasil’čenko, T. V. (2007). Sovremennye Anglojazyčnye Perevody Romana F. M. Dostoevskogo “Brat’ja Karamazovy”: K Voprosu o Perevodčeskix Strategijax v Anglojazyčnoj Kul’ture Konca XX v. Vestnik Tomskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, 305 (Dekabr’), 7–10.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/ff.2018.36.1.43-54
Date of publication: 2018-11-05 11:24:33
Date of submission: 2018-02-15 22:40:23


Statistics


Total abstract view - 1372
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 515

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2018

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.