Univerzita Pardubice Fakulta filozofická

Univerzita Pardubice

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Publikace detail

Premodifiers and Postmodifiers in Contrastive Perspective: English and Czech Eurospeak

Autoři: Nováková Eva

Rok: 2024

Druh publikace: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Strana od-do: nestránkováno

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	Premodifiers and Postmodifiers in Contrastive Perspective: English and Czech Eurospeak	The elements which precede or follow a head of a complex noun phrase as its modifiers vary not only in form, but also in the way they convey additional information about the head noun: while the premodifying constituents typically keep implicit relations and, due to juxtaposition, contribute to complex condensation, the postmodifiers are expected to ensure higher interpretability of the required meaning, and thus enhance precision of the message conveyed. The present paper characterizes English modifiers in contrast with their Czech equivalents which manifest a range of cross-linguistic differences, i.e., translation shifts on various language levels (grammar, semantics, pragmatics). Distribution of the shifts is studied in the corpus of European Union official documents where nominality represents a significant stylistic feature. The analysis tests the supposition that analytic sequences of juxtaposed premodifiers will require complex reorganization of grammar units in the target language (Czech) in order to clarify semantic relations between the constituents of the source language (English); therefore, Czech equivalents will show higher tendency to explicitation which involves addition of lexical items to the target language. Formal means in postmodification shared by both the source and target language (prepositional phrases, relative clauses), on the contrary, could allow more literal translation, but will have to react to the synthetic character of Czech. Moreover, the Czech language is assumed to replace some nominal clusters with more “dynamic” verbal expressions that contribute to readability of the text. All translation shifts are assessed with regard to a tertium comparationis—highly standardized stylistic criteria for EU documents calling not only for accuracy and consistency of legal terms and textual schemata, but also for general “clarity” and “comprehensibility”, as promoted within a Clear Writing Campaign which seeks to cultivate inaccessible burea	noun phrase; modifiers; translation shifts; eurospeak; contrastive functional analysis