Audronė Šolienė Vilnius University

14-16 November 2013

A parallel corpus is a useful tool for linguistic research: a case study of English MUST and its Lithuanian

correspondences

Audronė ŠolienėVilnius University

14-16 November 2013

Innovative Information Technologies for Science, Business and Education IIT-2013

OUTLINE

• Linguistic issue under analysis: – epistemic-evidential overlap (Palmer 2001,

Pietrandrea 2005, Cornillie 2007, Mortelmans 2001, 2009)

• ParaCorp:– a parallel corpus can serve as a means to disclose

the epi-evid overlap

• Results:– Epi-evid use of MUST and its LT translational

correspondences

• Discussion and some conclusive remarks

14-16 November 2013 Innovative Information Technologies for Science, Business and Education IIT-2013

EPISTEMIC MODALITY

non-ep

possibility

epistemic propositional

necessity

non-ep

MODALITY

•propositional modality used by speakers to express their judgments and attitudes towards the factual status of the proposition (Palmer 2001)


EVIDENTIALITY

visual/auditory/other sensory

direct evidence

indirect evidence

reportedinferentialobservational & logical

(Willet 1988: 65)

EVIDENTIALITY

•the category the speaker uses to indicate what sources of information/kind of evidence s/he has to assert the truth of a proposition(Faller 2002, Pietrandrea 2005, Cornillie 2007)

Epistemic-evidential overlap

• Inferential evidentiality = epistemic necessity

(van der Auwera & Plungian (1998: 86)14-16 November 2013 Innovative Information Technologies for Science, Business and

Education IIT-2013

Necessity

… Deontic necessity

Epistemic necessity

=Inferential evidentiality

Quotative evidentiality

…

Evidentiality

Should we bind his wounds? He must be in pain.

MUST: two distinct prototypical cores

• Epistemic-inferential necessityIt must be raining.

felicitous when the speaker has inferred that it is raining, not when he has directly observed it (Portner 2009:171)

• Non-epistemic (participant-external deontic)

necessityPlease... you must leave.


FOCUS (1)• epistemic-inferential use of MUST and its

LT correspondences• in LT transl (EN orig LT transl)

Hagrid must have forgotten to tell him something you had to do…

Tikriausiai Hagridas jį pamiršo pamokyti, ką reikia dar padaryti…

• in LT orig (EN transl LT orig)…velnias, galva kaip medinė, atmerkęs akis pamato skersai

stalo pamestas kelnes, matyt, jau labai gražus parėjo…hell, his head feels like wood, when he opens his eyes he sees

his pants thrown across the table, he must have come home a pretty sight…

.14-16 November 2013 Innovative Information Technologies for Science, Business and

Education IIT-2013


FOCUS (2): Aux/adv Strategy

EN vs. Slavonic• Epistemic possibility in a Slavonic parallel corpus - a

pilot study (van der Auwera, Schalley, Nuyts 2005) Translations of a Harry Potter book

• 10: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Ukrainian

• Potential vs. use: difference in frq of aux/adv strategy use

• Areality issue: the phenomenon of the eastward decreasing frequencies of mod auxiliaries

• Difference in degree of grammaticalization

AIM

• Qualitative & quantitative parameters of translational correspondence

• Analysis of choice of adv/verb strategies in translation



METHOD & DATA corpus-based contrastive analysis parallel corpus ParaCorp LTE

• bidirectional (E>LT & LT>E)• fiction (written)• time span: 1980 – 2006• No of translators:

ENLT: 15 (5 men; 10 women)

LTEN: 29 (10 men; 19 women) The sub-corpora compiled:

1. The E-LT ParaCorp (873,511 words)2. The LT-E ParaCorp (698,987 words)


ParaCorp LTE • Sentence alignment

– Aligner LYGIA (Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University)<senalign>

<lang value="lt"><s>Prabudusi ji visada pirmiausia pamatydavo suplyšusias užuolaidas.</s></lang>

<lang value="en"><s>The first thing Vacė ever saw when she awoke in the morning was the torn curtains.</s></lang>

</senalign><senalign><lang value="lt"><s>Jau sudūlėjusios nuo senumo, jos plyšdavo, vos

prisilietus.</s></lang><lang value="en"><s>Yellowed with age, they'd tear from the slightest

touch.</s></lang></senalign>• ParaConc tool (Barlow 1995)

– Excel spreadsheet– Multidirectional search but not automatic

Ep/Non-ep MUST in Eorig


•n= 265


Correspondences of Ep must in LTtransl : adv/verb strategy

ENorig: This must all sound so silly to you. (aux)LTtransl: Tau turbūt tai atrodo baisiai kvaila. (adv)

tikriausiai ‘most probably’, matyt ‘seemingly’, turbūt ‘probably’ 42 %


Correspondences of Ep must in LTtransl

ParaCorpELT %words/particles(ADV)

tikriausiai ‘most probably’ 22matyt ‘seemingly/evidently’

18

turbūt ‘probably’, greičiausiai, veikiausiai ‘most probably’etc.

11

verbs turėti ‘must/have to’ 22Ø LT 25


Illustration of correspondences

E - original LT - translation It must be easier to live beautiful lives when you're posh.

TIKRIAUSIAI‘most

probably’

Tikriausiai aristokratams lengviau gyventi gražų gyvenimą.

A sharp cry of pain was wrung out of her. She must have fallen right on the injured arm.

MATYT‘seemingly’

Pasigirdo skardus, skausmo kupinas riktelėjimas. Matyt, nugriuvo tiesiai ant sužeistos rankos.

That must have been horrible for you.

TURĖTI‘must/have

to’

– Tau turėjo būti baisu.


Correspondences of Ep must in LTorig : adv/verb strategy

9%

56%

35%

Verbs %Adv/Word %Ø%

LTorig: Jie visi su tarbom, maišais, krepšiais. Matyt, grįžta iš kaimo, pasirinkę maisto. (adv) Etrans: They're all carrying baskets, bags, and sacks. They must be returning from the village where they got food. (aux)


Correspondences of Ep must in LTorig

ParaCorpLTE %words/particles(ADV)

turbūt ‘probably’ 17matyt ‘seemingly’ 12ko gero ‘probably’, greičiausiai ‘most probably’, gal ‘perhaps’ etc.

27

verbs turėti ‘must/have to’ 9Ø LT 35


Ø correspondences of MUSTØ in LT_transl

(omitted)Ø in E_transl

(inserted)

25% 35%SL Hagrid, he said

quietly, “I think you must have made a mistake”.

Šį vakarą, vairuodamas mašiną Aukštaitijos pusėn, jis pirmą kartą pagalvojo, kad nusipirko namą kartu su Uršulėlės mirtimi.

TL - Hagridai, - ramiai tarė jis, - manau, jog suklydote.

That night, driving the car in the direction of Aukstaitija, for the first time Vaitkus thought that he must have bought the house together with Ursula's death.


Ø correspondences

Ø LT_transl

MAY 22 %MIGHT 20 %COULD 37 %PERHAPS/MAYBE

9 %

• <s>Sophie, we both may be in danger.</s>

• <s>Sofi, mums abiem gresia pavojus.</s>


Translational paradigms: different degrees of likelihood

E - original LT - translation

There was no telescreen, but there must be hidden microphones.

GALĖTI‘can/may/

might’

Teleekrano nebuvo, bet galėjo būti paslėptų mikrofonų.

A few must not have reached their homes yet.

GAL‘maybe’

Gal dar ne visi grįžę.

MUST GAL ‘maybe’, GALĖTI ‘can/may/might’ 3 %

Translational paradigms: different degrees of likelihood

SL TL

“It might be a long time," said O'Brien.

MIGHTTIKRIAUSIAI, VEIKIAUSIAI

‘most probably’TURĖTI ‘have to/ must’ 3

%

— Tikriausiai dar negreit, — tarė O'Brajenas.

Perhaps that is because Mr. Wren comes here every year!

PERHAPS TIKRIAUSIAI, TURBŪT ‘most

probably’9 %

Tikriausiai todėl, kad ponas Renas čia atvyksta kiekvienais metais!

Na tai tikriausiai šia suknia vilkėjo elektromagnetinė stebuklinga mergelė Maranela.

TIKRIAUSIAI, TURBŪT ‘most probably’

PERHAPS, MAYBE 8 %

So, perhaps it was the miraculous electromagnetic maiden, Maranela, who wore this gown.


Semantic core of evidentials - inferential source: LT

MATYT• Direct perception (non-modal)

– Matau saulę.‘I see the sun’

• Indirect perception evidential meaning– Iškart matyti, kad esate kūrusi muziką. ‘It is evident that you have created music’

• Parenthesis evid- ep modal meaning– Jis, matyt, mirtinai nuobodžiavo.

‘‘Apparently, he was bored to death’



Correspondences of MATYT

MATYT LT_orig E_transl

LT_transl E_orig

n=62 % n=90 %

seem/appear/look 20 32 11 12

must 7 12 22 24

apparently/obviously/evidently

14 23 29 32

most likely/probably/no doubt

3 5 2 2

quite possibly/perhaps 1 2 5 6

guess/think/suppose 1 2 9 10

Ø 15 24 12 13

Inferential sources & MATYT (1)

• Evidence inferred from observed results• …langelį uždengia blyški paklodė. Matyt, prausis.• …the window was covered by a pale sheet. He was

obviously going to bathe.• …kiemas buvo pilnas žvėrelių. Šitame kelio ruože,

matyt, buvo įrengta požeminė perėja žvėreliams.• …the yard was full of animals. It seemed that there

was an underground pedestrian walkway on this side of the highway.


Inferential sources & MATYT (2)

•Evidence inferred by logical reasoning

• Pačiam vienam būtų visai prastai. Matyt, ir Vytautas negali likti vienas.

• If I were left all by myself, it would be much worse. Quite possibly, Vytautas can't stay alone either.



Summing up• Choice of V/ADV strategy

– Dominance of mod ADVs in LT fiction

correspondence in SL & TL

• Overlap of ep necessity and possibility in LT– language-specific conceptualization of modal

epistemic-inferential necessity (& possibility)– different nuances of evidence different

degrees of certainty (Boye & Harder 2009)


References• Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.• Boye, Kasper and Peter Harder. 2009. Evidentiality: Linguistic categories and

grammaticalization. Functions of Language 16 (1), 9-43.• Cornillie, Bert. 2007. Epistemic Modality and Evidentiality in Spanish (semi-) auxiliaries. A

Cognitive-functional Approach. Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter.• Cornillie, Bert. 2009. Evidentiality and epistemic modality: on the close relationship of two

different categories. Functions of Language. 16 (1), 44-32.• de Haan, Ferdinand. 1999. Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality: Setting Boundaries.

Southwest Journal of Linguistics 18, 83-101.• Mortelmans, Tanja. 2000. On the ‘evidential’ nature of the ‘epistemic’ use of the German

modals müssen and sollen. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 14, 131-148.• Palmer, Frank R. 2001. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.• Pietrandrea, Paola. 2005. Epistemic Modality. Functional Properties and the Italian System.

Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins.• Plungian, Vladimir A. 2001. The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical

space. Journal of pragmatics 33, 349-357.• Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie and Karin Aijmer. 2007. The Semantic Field of Modal

Certainty. A Corpus-Based Study of English Adverbs. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.• Squartini, Mario. 2004. Disentangling evidentiality and epistemic modality in Romance.

Lingua 114 (7), 873-889



Explanation: change of meaning

• (Johansson 2001: 238) ’The general background for zero correspondences is the weakened meaning of SEEM.’

• (Aijmer 2000): SURELY Grammaticalization+Subjectification: ’unidirectional development from the literal meaning of certainty emphasis a degree of uncertainty.’


Probability seem in E, SE & NO

The findings are in line with results in SE & NO

• The frequency of zero correspondences of SEEM in the Norwegian text is about 16% (Johansson (2001: 238)

• Ø correspondences of Swedish particles– VISST (‘?seems’) in English is about

16.9% (Aijmer 1996: 411); – VÄL (‘probably’/‘perhaps’) is 38%

(Aijmer 1996: 415);

Ep possibility+ necessity: STRATEGIES

AUX / V ADV

n f/ 1000 n f/1000

EN 2019 4,15 860 1,77

LT 174 0,59 897 3,02

LL +1044,11 -125,68


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