Why so elusive? : A cross-linguistic study of English, Czech and Norwegian connectives.

Abstract

This thesis is an attempt to investigate to what degree and possibly for what reason the connectives are - seemingly without source - added into texts translated into Czech and Norwegian, and to what degree and for what reason they ‘disappear’ in the English translations. The analysis was based on a database of sentences containing at least one connective in an original language and its translation equivalents in the remaining two languages. All directions of translation were studied. The database was self-compiled and it contained 826 sentences from fiction. Three original Norwegian and Czech titles, plus four English titles and their translations into the respective languages were included into the database. Czech has an individual group of connectives which comprises various items with different functions. Connectives in English, however, are considered just a subgroup of a larger group of discourse markers/particles. According to Fisher (2006), discourse particles are features of the written language, while discourse markers are considered to be a feature of the spoken language. The Czech connectives consist of three groups of particles: linking, focus and modal/modifying. Czech linking particles were in Chapter 2 identified as cognates of discourse particles. Furthermore, the focus particles are not considered to have a connective function in English. They were nevertheless included into the English theoretical background, because English and Czech focus particles have similar roles and seem to be translational equivalents. Norwegian does not have a distinct group of connectives either. Czech linking particles and English discourse particles seem to be cognates with Norwegian ‘kontekstbindande adverbialer’ and so do Norwegian focus adverbs with English and Czech focus particles. The third group of Czech connectives – modifying particles do not have a counterpart in the English language, and of all Czech connectives they are left out in English translations the most. So are Norwegian modal particles and that was the main reason why they were included in this study. The Czech modifying particles were compared with the German modal particles by Nekula (1996), who concluded that they have the same functions. Similarities can be drawn also between the Norwegian modal particles and the German modal particles. Therefore it was assumed that it would be possible to see certain parallels between the Norwegian and Czech modal particles. All directions of translations in these three languages were studied: English source texts and their target texts in Czech and Norwegian; Czech and English translations of Norwegian source texts and Czech source texts and their translations into Norwegian and English. While in English the juxtaposition of sentences seems sufficient to express logical relations, the interrelationship between sentences in Czech tends to be expressed explicitly by (mostly) linking connectives. The other possible reason for the less frequent use of connectives in English may be how the two languages conceptualize information from the Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) point of view. The word order in Czech is mostly determined by communicative dynamism (theme and rheme), which means that the most important information is in a sentence always positioned towards the end of the sentence. While in an analytic language like English the functional sentence perspective is expressed more or less equally by all means of FSP (word order, intonation and grammatical constructions). Therefore it can be argued that Czech uses (mainly) focus particles and modifying particles as an equivalent to the other means of FSP that are used in English to highlight the new information in a sentence. The above assumptions were partially confirmed in the analysis. When it comes to the modal/modifying particles, the analysis has shown that the modal particles in Norwegian do not correspond with the modifying particles in Czech. Norwegian modal particles correspond with the Czech exocentric modal particles and are in English, and in Czech as well, quite often rendered by a range of adverbs and verb constructions expressing various degrees of modality. It seems that both in Czech and Norwegian there is a greater need to highlight the speaker than in English. In Norwegian this is achieved mostly by means of modal particles and in Czech by means of modifying particles, which however, unlike the Norwegian modal particles, do not as much express the speakers view on the truth of the locution, but rather contextual implications.