Grammaticalized English verbs and their translation into Russian

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Language as a lively system undergoes a continuous process of changing. New word combinations, expressions and phrases come into use, and old ones phase out. Grammar, which is regarded to be one of the most stable layers of language, tends to change as well. Due to the small number of researches in the field of grammaticalization, it is especially interesting to study this phenomenon and the obstacles which can appear in the process of translating grammaticalized words and constructions.
The term grammaticalization was first used in the article of Antoine Meillet “L’evolution des formes grammaticales” in 1912. Nevertheless, the concept itself has been developing from the 1970-s only. Different approaches to this phenomenon resulted in an ambiguous interpretation of the term, also known as a synonym grammatization or grammaticization. Grammaticalization is a process of forming grammatical markers derived from lexemes, which is explicit on grammatical, morphological, and semantic levels. English verbs derived from other lexemes change their syntactical status and the position in the sentence: do as an auxiliary verb vs. do as a part of emphatic constructions. Semantically, this process concerns new meanings of grammaticalized elements: will as a noun vs. will as a grammaticalized element in future tense.
The first problem for non-native speakers of English and for Russian speakers in particular, is identifying the grammaticalized elements which are often not used in spoken language and exist only in the written form (e.g. in fiction), because they are typical of colloquial style yet. The syntactical relations between words in sentences and context can significantly help the translators to understand the meaning of the lexical units and to find the appropriate equivalent in the target language.
After identifying the grammaticalized verb or construction, a translator faces the problem of its translation into Russian which can be explained by different language systems and ways of extending the vocabulary. The first example illustrates the use of grammaticalized elements which are typical for colloquial style only and used in fiction for characterizing the main heroes and their speech.
(1) Whatcha gonna do in Philly? Al had asked. (S. Sheldon, “If Tomorrow Comes”)
In this case, a translator has to use grammaticalized verbs in Russian as well, in order to preserve the grammar tense.
(2) I’ll offer to go, if anybody else will. (Сh. Dickens, “A Christmas Carol in Prose”)
(3) In what proportions it should be divided amongst the latter depended on the will of the parents. (J. Austen, “Pride and prejudice”)
In the second example, will is a part of an English grammaticalized construction for composing sentences in future tense. In contrast, the third example illustrates the preservation of older forms and meanings: will is used as a noun meaning “wish, desire”.
One more interesting phenomenon in English, the attributive constructions, which do not exist in many languages, including Russian, is shown by example 4:
(4) I’m sure that by the time we reached the baseball field there was on every Comanche’s face a some-girls-just-don’t-know-when-to-go-home look. (J. Salinger, “The Laughing Man”)
In such sentences, a descriptive (explanatory) method of translation is normally used.
The history of the words derivation, or their etymology indicates the earlier period of forming this kind of grammaticalized words. It means that even in the Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) the process of grammaticalization took place for the purposes of forming new words. Interestingly, English word goodbye was formed by the shortening of the expression God (good) be with you which has an equivalent in Russian but did not undergo the process of grammaticalization. However, Russian greeting form zdravstvuite (hello) is derived from the noun zdravie (health) and initially meant a wish of health. This fact proves the semantic ground of the grammaticalization process which implies several stages of the meaning development. The English word goodbye has also undergone changes in pronunciation, i.e. phonetic reduction.
In modern English such verbs as gonna, wanna, gotta and hafta derived from the verbs going to, want to, got to and have to serve as markers of an informal style and have also undergone the process of grammaticalization. Apparently, in translation they can be reflected by various stylistic means of the target language which are typical only of the informal style as well.
Thus, grammaticalization is quite a complex process of deriving new words and constructions, mostly from already existing ones in a certain language. What can cause difficulties while translating them is that many constructions which exist in one language or language group may lack equivalents in other languages. Moreover, due to semantic changes, new syntactical and phonetic patterns, it becomes difficult to identify them in the original text without some background knowledge about the history of the language and advanced language skills.

Source:

British National Corpus

Written by: Asmik Avagyan. Translator and student of the “Master in Learning and Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts” of the University of Luxembourg