Non-finite forms translated by finite ones : Impact on the Syntax of fictional translated texts (analysis in the French-Czech-English part of the InterCorp parallel corpus)
Abstract
The French gerund is a non-finite form expressing adverbial meanings, such as concomitant circumstance, means, manner or concession (cf. Halmoy 2003 or König - Auwera 1990).
In contemporary French, it is formed by the discontinuous morpheme en -ant (en parlant - while speaking), in opposition to the present participle, formed only by the suffix -ant (parlant). In the adverbial meanings, the usage of both forms may overlap.
Haspelmath (1995) considers the Romance (and the English) gerund as converb; Nedjalkov (1995) points out that the Slavic transgressive is a converb, too. For this reason, it is possible to use the term converb as tertium comparationis in contrastive corpus-based analyses of gerunds in these languages.
The thorough corpus-based research carried out by Čermák - Nádvorníková et al. (2015) confirmed that the adverbial forms of gerunds in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French are effectively converbs (more clearly in French and in Italian, cf. the category of monofunctional converb in Nedjalkov 1995), the present participle being more a quasi-converb. Nevertheless, the potential Czech equivalent of these forms, the transgressive, is nearly extinct.
For this reason, it has to be replaced by other forms, the most often by a finite verb in a coordinate or in a subordinate clause. In this paper, we will analyze the impact of the transposition of the French gerund and the present participle into a finite verb on the syntax and the information density of the corresponding Czech sentence(s) (cf.
Fabricius-Hansen 1999): in fact, as shown in Nádvorníková 2017, so that to avoid the accumulation of finite verbs in a sentence, Czech translators often split such sentences in two. For this reason, we expect that the splitting of sentences containing gerunds/present participle in French will be more frequent in non-fiction than in fiction, as sentences are longer in the former than in the latter (cf.
Nádvorníková - Šotolová 2016). We expect as well that the shifts in segmentation in sentences containing gerunds will involve also the introduction of connectives specifying the relationship between sentences, the explicitation (repetition) of the subject, etc.
Last but not least, the French equivalents of the (rare) occurrences of the Czech transgressive will be analyzed, too. So that to verify that these changes are not an effect of the language of translation (translationese, Tirkkonen-Condit 2002), we will observe the French gerunds in the translated texts and their counterparts in the Czech originals, too, and we will include a second, typologically different translated language in the analysis (English).
Thus, the French-Czech-English part of the InterCorp parallel corpus (www.korpus.cz/intercorp), limited to the fictional and non-fictional texts, will be used as source of data for this research, that will - as we hope - contribute to the understanding of the cross-linguistic category of converb in the three languages.