Title Realizations of Epistemic Modality in English and Lithuanian: Parameters of Equivalence /
Translation of Title Episteminio modalumo ekvivalentiškumo parametrai anglų ir lietuvių kalbose.
Authors Šolienė, Audronė
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Pages 39
Keywords [eng] epistemic modality ; possibility ; necessity ; contrastive analysis ; corpus-based analysis
Abstract [eng] The thesis deals with epistemic modality and its realizations in English and Lithuanian. It focuses on the quantitative and qualitative parameters of equivalence between the lexical exponents of epistemic modality in the two languages. The axis of contrast is laid on the auxiliary and adverb strategies (van der Auwera et al. 2005): a probe is made into the cross-linguistic distribution and behavior of the central English modal auxiliaries of possibility and necessity and epistemic stance adverbials as opposed to their counterparts in Lithuanian. It is a contrastive analysis based on the data obtained from a self-compiled bi-directional parallel corpus of fiction texts and their translations into Lithuanian and English. The findings show that, despite the existence of the same adverbial and verb strategies for epistemic meaning realization in the two languages, their implementation differs. Lithuanian shows a significantly higher frequency of adverbials as opposed to English. Due to the high degree of grammaticalization, English usually favors modal auxiliaries for expressing epistemic modality. The findings show that epistemic meaning can be determined by various constraints, the most important of which are complement stativity and subject specification. The analysis of the translational paradigm could suggest that the boundaries between low and high degree of probability can be blurred in Lithuanian. The abundance of inserted modal adverbials and the phenomenon of zero correspondence seem to be a compensatory way to bridge the language-specific differences in modal meaning realization. This could also signal differences in culture-specific conceptualization of probability and varying use of pragmatic conventions.
Type Summaries of doctoral thesis
Language English
Publication date 2013