Get started
Work

Constructions With Verbs of Speech and Physical Action in Russian Translated Texts: Aspectuality, Finiteness, Foregrounding

Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The paper deals with the variation of such key characteristics of verb forms as aspectuality and finiteness when translating from English into Russian constructions with verbs of physical and verbal action in narrative texts. The situations of changing temporal relations between predicates in the construction are considered in cases of unambiguity of the original contexts (e.g., he said and rubbed his hands - сказал он, потирая руки ). The phenomenon under study is illustrated by examples from a polyvariant set of Russian translated narratives created in the 20 th -21 st centuries, and the results of counting on the parallel corpus of the Russian National Corpus are taken into account. The results of the study show that the variation in translation of finite and aspectual characteristics of verb forms in constructions with verbs of speech and physical action is related not so much to the notion of consecutiveness in the narrative as to the phenomena of information hierarchisation and foregrounding - focusing on certain events. The choice of the finite form when translating a verb into Russian highlights the event, while the non-finite form obscures it, emphasising its secondary character; the choice of the perfect form embeds the phenomenon in the narrative chain, while the imperfect form tends to denote background processes and states. Non-finite forms are usually chosen by translators for those verbs that have a high frequency in the form of converbs, i.e. are tend to background use in speech and in narrative texts (they denote etiquette and accompanying gestures, changes of posture, manifestations of emotion, etc.). The simultaneous variation of both the finite and aspectual characteristics of the verb produces a tangible pragmatic effect and may represent a conscious translation technique that allows using grammatical means (finite forms of perfective verbs) to accentuate the events highlighted in the original at the lexical or compositional level.
DOI: 10.55959/msu0130-0075-9-2024-47-04-7
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
Award: G753993095
OpenAlex ID: W4401824378
FWCI: 1.65
Cites: 7
Cited by: 1
Related to: 10