The Ways of Rendering Functional Sentence Perspective and Semantic Emphasis of a Stanza when Translating a Poetic Text (as Illustrated by Tatyana Lavrova’s Poem “A Girl Who Has Survived the War”)

В статье рассматриваются особенности передачи функциональной перспективы русских предложений, строк и строф стихотворного текста при переводе на английский язык. Автор уделяет особое внимание передаче различных видов инверсии с учетом расстановки смысловых акцентов, а также переводу номинативных (безглагольных) предложений и предложений с эллипсисом подлежащего. Переводческое исследование проводится на материале собственного перевода на английский язык стихотворения Т. Лавровой «Девочка, прошедшая войну» и затрагивает как синтаксические, так и лексические аспекты перевода выбранного произведения. This article examines peculiarities of rendering functional sentence perspective within a line, a sentence, and a verse when translating Russian poetry into English. Special attention is given to the ways of representing different types of inversion that are inextricably linked to semantic emphasis, as well as to the translation of nominal (or nonverbal) sentences and one-member sentences where the subject is omitted. The author illustrates her ideas with her own translation of the poem “A Girl Who has Survived the War” by Tatyana Lavrova into English and speaks about both syntactic and semantic aspects of translation of the poem under analysis.

Emphatic italics and the information structure of a prose text

The emphatic function of italics has largely been ignored by linguists despite the value its understanding clearly has for written discourse studies. This paper aims to fill this gap. It is inspired by the types of relationship between the degrees of communicative dynamism and the degrees of prosodic prominence which the theory of functional sentence perspective has established for spoken language and applies them to written communication. At the same time, it maintains the distinction between the two modes of communication and suggests that it is only through covert prosody that any real parallels may be sought. The study uses two versions of a small corpus of written fiction. In the first version the original emphatic italics are preserved. In this instance the author’s intended covert prosody is partially accessible to the reader. The second version is one from which emphatic italics were removed. In this case the reader can only rely on their own covert prosody for interpretation. The versions were analyzed separately, and the analyses were then compared. Three relational types between the plain and italicized versions are identified: typographically amplifying, typographically revaluating, and typographically disambiguating. The paper concludes by suggesting some further avenues of research.

Thematic and Rhematic Realisations of Key Words in the Functional Sentence Perspective of Texts

The article seeks to account for the way key words are picked up for co-reference and whether they are marked as the theme or rheme in the functional perspective of each sentence. A corpus of articles is analysed from major French media. The co-referential chains of the key words are traced to determine the rhythm of the thematic progression.

Moving Words

SummaryWe move words and words move us. To describe and explain how and why this happens, the present article focuses on Prague traditions, both on the philosophical and linguistic elements. The semantic and syntactic approach is summarized, as developed by Anton Marty, belonging to the Brentano school, and by Vilém Mathesius, founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle, as well as by Jan Firbas, who developed the functional sentence perspective (FSP) into the theory of communicative dynamism (CD). The four Principles of FSP and the four factors of CD are highlighted, together with the related criticism that stems from a systematic work of corpus annotation, a true test procedure for any theory concerned with word order, the interplay between lexicon and morphology, rhythm, intonation and their effects on the addressee’s psychic and emotive processes and life.

Functional Sentence Perspective in Translator Training

This paper highlights the need for raising translation studentsʼ awareness of issues related to the thematic structure of source and target texts. This is a problematic area which significantly affects the quality of translations, especially from English into Polish, the latter having more flexible word order and thus opening more syntactic possibilities. An especially useful tool that may help to address this issue is the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) developed by the Prague School. Despite the fact that it is quite elaborate, it may be trimmed to fit more practicallyoriented translation classes. Based on examples from student translations, the paper shows that such notions as communicative dynamism, context dependence/independence, competitors of the verb, setting vs. specification, Presentation Scale vs. Quality Scale, and potentiality can help trainee translators to correctly identify the hierarchy of carriers of communicative dynamism in their source texts and then make informed translation choices.

Parallel corpora and contrastive linguistics: Where to look for pitfalls in the translation of information structure

This paper deals with some of the problems encountered in English-Czech contrastive studies of information structure based on parallel texts. It largely focuses on those arising from the different hierarchy of the respective word order principles, the primary one being grammatical function in English, and information structure / functional sentence perspective (FSP) in Czech. Three aspects are considered: linear ordering of clause elements, FSP structure, and the basic distribution of communicative dynamism. Owing to the character and complexity of the FSP factors, word order, context, semantics and intonation, and the lack of distinctive realization forms of the carriers of the FSP functions, the study is based on manual excerpts from passages of digitalized running text of three English novels and their Czech translations drawn from the InterCorp. The results show that most problems arise in the case of different linear ordering as it may indicate either an identical or a different FSP structure.