Syntax constructions of indirect evideniality in french: russian translation

Abstract

This article covers French syntactic constructions – complex sentences and parentheticals – as overt manifestations of indirect evidentiality in the language. Linguistic problems in the field of contrastive linguistics employ "a word - a word", "a word - a phrase" and "a phrase - a word" relations as functionally equivalent fragments. Search of translation matches implies finding all equivalences of a construction when used in the translation. For this, the authors used a total search strategy and an implicative strategy for meaning matching. Research data (up to 50 occurrences) were derived from the parallel corpus of French-Russian translations of the Russian National Corpus (RNC). The study showed that in French, indirect evidentiality, which implies acquiring information from third parties, is characterized by full and minimal representations of the source of information. The former corresponds to a complex sentence in which the main clause is authorizing and subordinate clause, introduced by the conjunction que, is informing. The latter involves uses of pour lui, à son avis, selon lui, with selon lui, poor lui being more frequent. When translating, the status of a complex sentence is preserved. One can only replace the informative part with a verbal noun. At the lexical level, both languages use reporting verbs. French parentheticals are mainly translated with the similar Russian one – po yego mneniyu. Pour lui is also rendered with dlya nego. These constructions tend to express personal attitudes and opinions, i.e. a subjective evaluation or judgement. Data analysis from the RNC shows that in translation they explicate reportative evidential. Usually this potential is ‘triggered’ by the context of parenthetical phrases.