scholarly journals WHO IS THAT MYSTERIOUS WE IN RUSSIAN AND ESTONIAN? (ON THE METAPHORICAL USE OF 1st PERSON PLURAL FORMS)

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Sirje Kupp-Sazonov
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Verb Forms

The article is devoted to the metaphorical use of 1person plural forms in Russian and Estonian. Personal pronouns is one of the first topics that is introduced to the learner of any language. In Russian and Estonian the systems of personal pronouns are quite similar. The essence of the 1person plural is primarily defined as follows: ‘a speaker refers to himself or herself and somebody else’. That somebody else can be one person, many people, or even people in general. It can sometimes be very difficult to decide to whom we refers. The metaphorical use of 1 person plural forms is not identical in Russian and Estonian. Some metaphorical uses are regular in Russian but are not common in Estonian; it depends on the cultural and linguistic traditions of the language in question. In the paper will be analysed some cases of metaphorical use, such as 'royal we', 'authorial we', plural of modesty, 'doctoral we', ‘sartorial we’, 'mother’s we' etc. It is noticeable that these metaphorical uses can cause some difficulties in learning the language and also in the translation process. It can be claimed that in Russian and with some limitations also in Estonian the 1 person plural can “replace” all the other pronouns and verb forms. It is important to keep in mind these differences between languages when teaching or translating.

Het verlies van een persoonlijk voornaamwoord* : Waarom hun straks geen hun meer zeggen

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-362
Author(s):  
Helen de Hoop
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Dutch Society ◽  
Possessive Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Third Person

Abstract The loss of a personal pronoun. Why they will not be saying hun anymoreThe personal pronoun hun ‘them’ meets a lot of criticism in Dutch society, not just from language purists, but from language users in general. This can be attributed to a strong mistrust of the pronoun, given that it is well-known for violating no less than two prescriptive rules, one of which prohibits its use as a subject, and the other its use as a direct object or complement of a preposition. This has resulted in a tendency to avoid the use of this personal pronoun across the board. Despite the fact that hun ‘them’ as a personal pronoun has the advantage of exclusively referring to animate or even human individuals, I argue that it is fighting a losing battle with the other personal pronouns that are used to express third person plural. I conclude that it will withdraw from the competition in order to commit itself entirely to its function as a possessive pronoun ‘their’, in which capacity it is unique.

scholarly journals LINGUOSTYLISTIC MEANS OF CONTEXTUAL SEGMENTATION OF THE OLD ENGLISH POEM THE SEAFARER

2019 ◽  
pp. 115-127
Author(s):  
Sergey V. Mukhin ◽  
◽  
Darya A. Efremova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Linguistic Means ◽  
Finite Verb

The article is concerned with the analysis of the linguostylistic means used to effect contextual segmentation of the Old English elegy The Seafarer. It is hypothesized that discourse types of the poem including narration with some elements of description, reasoning and implicit dialogue are the key means to convey the author’s main idea. The focus of the study is on the use of the principal lexical and grammatical markers indicating the change of discourse types: personal pronouns of the 1st and 3rd person, finite verb forms and connotationally diversified vocabulary. In the narrative part, the emphasis is made on the extensive use of pronominal and verb forms of the 1st person singular as well as on the prevalence of emotive lexical units with negative meaning. Reasoning was discovered to be characterized by the domination of the 3rd person forms and balanced use of lexical units with negative and positive semantics. Implicit dialogue was found to be notably rich in pronominal forms of the 1st person plural and causative modality expressed by lexical and grammatical means. We conclude that the poem under study features a triform composition built by various linguistic means on the grammatical, lexical and stylistic levels.

Intrusões: Guimarães Rosa-Bogotá Notas para uma tradução de “Páramo”

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bairon Oswaldo Vélez
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Original Version ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Spanish Translation ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
Mountain Sickness

This paper comments on the first Spanish translation of João Guimarães Rosa's short story "Páramo", which narrates the exile of a Brazilian lost with mountain sickness in a cold and hostile Bogotá. This translation is briefly explained in the following pages, giving special emphasis to some prominent features of the original version, in addition to the cultural context, critical and theoretical readings and the translation strategy evident in the translator‘s intervention. Finally, it is made clear how a certain perspective of the other – present in the original version as well – passes through the translation process and indicates the conditions of its presentation in the target language. The original article is in Portuguese.

Middle constructions in Romanian

2018 ◽  
Vol 134 (4) ◽  
pp. 1154-1176
Author(s):  
Alice Bodoc ◽  
Mihaela Gheorghe
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Implicit Argument ◽  
Adverbial Modification ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Middle Constructions ◽  
Heterogeneous Class

Abstract The present paper aims to present an inventory of Romanian middle contructions (se‑verbal constructions), and to extend the analysis to other structures (with or without se) that were not previously investigated, but exhibit the same characteristics, and seem to allow middle reading (adjunct middles). Since Jespersen (1927), middles were attested cross-linguistically, and the focus on middles is justified if we consider the fact that this is an interesting testing ground for theories of syntax, semantics and their interaction (Fagan 1992). Starting from Grahek’s definition (2008, 44), in this paper, middles are a heterogeneous class of constructions that share formal properties of both active and passive structures: on the one hand, they have active verb forms, but, on the other hand, like passives, they have understood subjects and normally display promoted objects. The corpus analysis will focus on the particular contexts in which the middle reading is triggered: i) the adverbial modification; ii) the modal/procedural interpretation of the event; iii) the responsibility of the subject; iv) the arbitrary interpretation of the implicit argument which follows from the generic interpretation (Steinbach 2002).

scholarly journals Women write the rights of woman: the sexual politics of the personal pronoun in the 1790s

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hodson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Analysis Programme ◽  
Political Pamphlets

This article investigates patterns of personal pronoun usage in four texts written by women about women's rights during the 1790s: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Hays' An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (1798), Mary Robinson's Letter to the Women of England (1799) and Mary Anne Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). I begin by showing that at the time these texts were written there was a widespread assumption that both writers and readers of political pamphlets were, by default, male. As such, I argue, writing to women as a woman was distinctly problematic, not least because these default assumptions meant that even apparently gender-neutral pronouns such as I, we and you were in fact covertly gendered. I use the textual analysis programme WordSmith to identify the personal pronouns in my four texts, and discuss my results both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that while one of my texts does little to disturb gender expectations through its deployment of personal pronouns, the other three all use personal pronouns that disrupt eighteenth century expectations about default male authorship and readership.

scholarly journals On honorification in Czech: The Czech polite forms: Theory and corpus data

2009 ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
Jarmila Panevova
Keyword(s):  
Person Plural ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Semantic Distinction

The author claims that the Czech polite forms (so-called 'vykani') for addressing the 2nd person should be understood as a legitimate part of the Czech conjugation paradigm. If we address a single person in a polite way some Czech analytical verb forms exhibit 'hybrid' agreement (auxiliaries are in plural, while participle form is in singular). However, the paradigm for singular and plural polite forms (addressing a single person, or two or more persons, respectively) is not symmetrical. The question, whether 2nd person plural polite forms are ambiguous (between the polite meaning and 2nd plural non-polite), or whether the semantic distinction 'polite - non-polite' is neutralized in plural, is open for further discussion. Some corpus data illustrating the contexts for the 2nd person polite forms are analyzed here too.

Una aproximación empírica a la ­clasificación y traducción de las figuras retóricas en la publicidad

Babel ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Calzada Perez
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Investigation ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
New Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Figures ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The One

Since ancient times the suasive value of rhetorical figures has been vastly studied. In fact, Aristotle himself argued that the aim of rhetoric was not just to persuade but to find the best methods of persuasion (Aristotle, Retorica, ed. 1990). These methods have been frequently used in advertising, where they are employed to capture the consumer’s attention and, consequently, to sell the advertised product. However (despite the frequent appearance of rhetorical figures in advertising), there is a scarcity of studies on the role of these persuasive mechanisms in the translation of publicity. Bearing upon the “new rhetoric”, the present paper has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it aims to import a clear taxonomy of rhetorical figures from advertising into translation studies and subsequently to illustrate the transfer of these figures. On the other hand, it analyses the behaviour of rhetorical figures in the translation process by means of an empirical investigation whose goal it is to further categorise them in a systematic and rational way. Drawing upon the seminal work of McQuarrie and his collaborators, the paper performs a quantitative analysis of a corpus of 120 matching pairs consisting of English advertisements and their existing Spanish counterparts. Results evidence that a great majority of rhetorical figures are “translated”, thus confirming the globalising tendencies of advertising.

scholarly journals We Shall Fight: Speaker-Exclusive We as a Grammatical Metaphor

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Francesca Santulli
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
First Person ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Plural Pronoun ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
The One ◽  
Metaphorical Interpretation

The first person plural pronoun cannot be considered as an expression of pluralization of the first. Its semantic boundaries are defined in context, and this inherent vagueness an be pragmatically exploited for communicative purposes. Beyond the frequently investigated opposition between (addressee-) inclusive vs exclusive forms, this paper explores non-prototypical uses of the first person plural pronoun, focusing on the conflicts that arise when it is used in contexts that semantically exclude the speaker. Speaker-exclusive forms can occur in different situations, ranging from interpersonal exchanges to public discourse. The paper investigates their different semantic implications, highlighting their common traits as well as their crucial peculiarities. Both the review of the literature and the analysis of actual examples bring forth the different values and functions of various speaker-exclusive occurrences of the first person plural. A more systematic categorization of the forms can be obtained adopting a metaphorical interpretation, which on the one hand emphasises their common denominator (i.e. speaker-exclusiveness) and, on the other, sheds light on their varying communicative potential.

scholarly journals The interpretation of German personal pronouns and d-pronouns

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-190
Author(s):  
Markus Bader ◽  
Yvonne Portele
Keyword(s):  
Bayesian Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Syntactic Function

Abstract Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.

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