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Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics
Karin Aijmer
Diana Lewis Editors
Contrastive Analysis
of Discourse-
pragmatic Aspects of
Linguistic Genres
Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics
Series Editor
Jesús Romero-Trillo, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Reviews Editor
Dawn Knight, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Contrastive Analysis of
Discourse-pragmatic Aspects
of Linguistic Genres
Editors
Karin Aijmer Diana Lewis
University of Gothenburg Department of English and
Gothenburg, Sweden Lerma Research Centre
Aix Marseille University
Aix-en-Provence, France
Introduction...................................................................................................... 1
Karin Aijmer and Diana Lewis
v
vi Contents
vii
Introduction
Abstract The aim of this issue of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and
Pragmatics is to explore the comparability of discourse-pragmatic characteristics of
genres across European languages, using parallel corpora (aligned translated texts)
and/or comparable corpora (genre-matched original texts). The articles have their
origin in a seminar at the 12th ESSE conference in Kosiče, Slovakia 29 August–2
September 2014 convened by the editors.
The aim of this issue of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics is to
explore the comparability of discourse-pragmatic characteristics of genres across
European languages, using parallel corpora (aligned translated texts) and/or compa-
rable corpora (genre-matched original texts). The articles have their origin in a
seminar at the 12th ESSE conference in Kosiče, Slovakia 29 August–2 September
2014 convened by the editors.
Renewed interest in contrastive linguistics over the past couple of decades, together
with increasing availability of specialised digital corpora, have resulted in a new,
usage-based approach to language comparison. The domain of contrastive linguis-
tics centres on the comparison, in synchrony, of two languages. In a break with the
‘applied’ approach to contrastive linguistics of the 1960s and 1970s, which tended
K. Aijmer (*)
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
e-mail: karin.aijmer@eng.gu.se
D. Lewis
Department of English and Lerma Research Centre, Aix Marseille University,
Aix-en-Provence, France
e-mail: diana.lewis@univ-amu.fr
course strategies, power status, speaker roles associated with the genre can explain
both formal and functional properties of the patterns. The focus is on spoken, writ-
ten or multimodal genres within domains such as political discourse, public com-
munication, journalism, stand-up comedy, academic and professional discourse,
addressing both methodological and theoretical issues. All adopt a usage-based
approach, exploiting a range of corpus material to reveal patterns of form and use in
one or more languages.
Genre-specific recurrent patterns can also be studied contrastively. The contras-
tive point of view highlights the dependence of the patterns on different social and
cultural practices in the compared languages. Languages involved in the compari-
sons with English are Czech, Dutch, French, Polish, Norwegian, Spanish and
Swedish.
Central to the contrastive analysis of linguistic phenomena is the use of parallel and
comparable corpora, and this volume illustrates the use of both types. Parallel cor-
pora consist of translations from one language to the other. Comparable corpora
consist of texts in two or more languages which are comparable with regard to
genre, formality, subject-matter, time-span, etc. (Aijmer 2008).
Parallel corpora can be further characterized as unidirectional or bidirectional,
depending on the translation direction. A bidirectional parallel corpus makes it pos-
sible to analyse how words and constructions in one language have been rendered in
the target language and to retrace the process to find the sources of the translations.
Parallel corpora were first used for lexical and grammatical studies but are now also
used as a resource to study discourse and pragmatic phenomena. As illustrated in
this volume, there now exist parallel corpora for many different language pairs usu-
ally with English as either the source or the target language. A parallel corpus is
above all a method to show differences or similarities between lexical elements or
constructions in two or more languages which may not be apparent to intuition.
Another approach is to use the parallel corpus is to test a hypothesis about how a
particular function is expressed in another language by making observations about
correspondences and arrive at a theoretical statement which is empirically based (cf.
Gast 2015). Dyvik (1998) addressed the question how translational phenomena can
be used for the study of meanings. In this perspective the corpus can provide a
resource in lexical semantics by mirroring meanings and functions of an element in
one language in another language. Translators are excellent informants since they
use their judgments to find the appropriate translation as a part of their professional
duties thus avoiding the observer’s paradox (Labov 1972). Translations should be
used with caution, however. The disadvantages of using parallel corpora is that they
may suffer from ‘translationese’ (Baker 1993; Baroni and Bernardini 2005),
source-text influence, the translator’s fingerprints, and uneven translation quality.
The results of the translation analysis should therefore also be tested on the basis of
4 K. Aijmer and D. Lewis
The volume is divided into three sections, according to the methodology and the
type of contrastive analysis carried out (cf. Aijmer 2008).
The first section comprises four papers based on parallel (translated-text) corpora.
Karin Aijmer’s contribution discusses obligation across languages and genres.
The starting-point is the observation that in both English and Swedish the meaning
of obligation can be expressed by a modal auxiliary. However must and its Swedish
Introduction 5
cognate måste are not always each other’s translation equivalents reflecting the fact
that there are several grammatical and lexical ways to express obligation. The trans-
lations of Swedish måste into English showed that måste was frequently translated
by the semi-modal have to especially in fiction. If have to and had to were conflated
the frequency would be even higher than for must as a translation choice. Need to,
should and ought to, on the other hand, were all more frequent in non-fiction than in
fiction. In the Swedish translations from English måste was most frequent both in
fiction and non-fiction. Other alternatives are få (‘may’), ska(ll), skulle (‘shall’,
‘should’), behöva (‘need’), bör (‘ought to’). Must and have to express different
meanings as a translation of måste. Have to, especially when qualified by will, is
downtoning and polite, it can have a general or generic meaning and it can indicate
negative evaluation. In Swedish ska(ll)/skulle can be used to express power and få
indicates that an action is unwelcome to the hearer. In non-fiction must, have to and
need (and their Swedish correspondences) are associated with interactional goals
and how these are evaluated as good or bad. By using impersonal structures with a
collective we as the grammatical subject or an agentless passive the speaker can get
the message across to the hearer with maximum hedging.
The aim of Lieven Buysse’s contribution is to examine the mutual translat-
ability of Dutch dus and English so. The corpus used is the Dutch-English com-
ponent of the Dutch Parallel Corpus (1997–2009). The texts belong to five text
types: fictional and non-fictional literature, journalistic texts, instructive texts,
administrative texts, and external communication. The corpus has been balanced
for text type and for translation direction and amounts in all to five million words.
Since it is a bidirectional corpus all the examples of so translated to dus (and dus
from Dutch into English) were included as well as ‘back-translations’. The func-
tional ranges of these two discourse markers were shown to be remarkably simi-
lar – the polysemies of dus and so overlapped almost completely – but there were
significant differences in frequency and distribution, with dus being both more
frequent overall and more associated with inference than so, which occurred more
typically in resultative contexts. Significant genre effects were found: as well as
being unevenly distributed across genres, dus and so also tended to occur with
different functions in different genres and were differently distributed according
to language. Thus the study not only demonstrates how semantic equivalence does
not result in translation equivalence, with only a sixth of source-text dus being
translated by so in the corpus, but also how genre constrains the markers differ-
ently in the two languages.
Michaela Martinková and Markéta Janebová wanted to investigate the evi-
dential and epistemic senses of the Czech particle prý by studying the functions of
prý reflected in the correspondences in another language. The authors used the
English-Czech and Czech-English sections of the Czech National Corpus- InterCorp,
which is a multilingual parallel corpus of texts written in 39 different languages
with their Czech counterparts. Their study focused on three registers which were
represented in the corpus: fiction, journalistic texts and spoken language. The
journalistic texts are represented by the PressEurope database (2009–2014). The
spoken language in InterCorp comes from Proceedings from the European
6 K. Aijmer and D. Lewis
Parliament and a corpus of Subtitles. Czech as source and as target language were
not differentiated in order to obtain a sensible amount of text from the European
Parliament. The sub-corpora vary in size and come from different periods. Moreover
there were more translations than target texts in the corpus.
The authors found different patterns of prý usage and different frequencies
according to genre as well as different patterns of translation. From these translation
patterns, and with the great majority of correspondences being evidential, the
authors concluded that the epistemic uses of prý are context-bound: the interpreta-
tion of the particle as conveying doubt may arise in the context as an inference from
the context.
Magdalena Szczyrbak discusses the correspondences between English modal
adverbs of certainty and their Polish correspondences in argumentative legal writ-
ing. The material used for the study consists of 30 Opinions of Advocated General
at the European Court of Justice, issued between 2011 and 2013 comprising about
576,000 words. The data has been drawn from source texts in English and their
Polish translations. The English texts were written by a native speaker of English,
whereas the translations were made by professionals having Polish as their native
language. At the outset the most frequent modal adverbs were identified in the
English sub-corpus and then the equivalents in the Polish sub-corpus were
determined.
The genre of Opinion was chosen because it was assumed that it would be rich
in persuasive devices. Modal adverbs of certainty have been shown in previous stud-
ies to be useful rhetorical devices inextricably linked to stance and argumentation.
They are for instance used both to foreground and background legal arguments and
to demonstrate power and authority. The modal adverbs studied were indeed, neces-
sarily, of course, clearly and obviously and their Polish correspondences. The trans-
lations were used to study both the conventional meanings of the adverbs and the ad
hoc meanings associated with the particular genre. It is shown that there were
noticeable differences between the English adverbs and their Polish correspon-
dences with regard to the degree of persuasiveness and that the author’s presence
was less visible in the Polish translations. Omission of the modal adverb in the
translation was shown to lessen the rhetorical force of the translated text and its abil-
ity to influence the reader.
The second part of the volume contains two papers based on comparable corpora.
Hilde Hasselgård’s study compares adverbial clause placement in English and
Norwegian cross-linguistically and across the genres fiction and news. End position
was the most common alternative in both English and Norwegian in both registers.
In the initial position there were both language and register differences. It is shown
that initial position was proportionally more frequent in fiction in English than in
Norwegian. However there was a higher frequency of initial clauses in news in both
Introduction 7
was given by President Obama in Cairo in 2009 and is 5871 words long. The study
is both quantitative and qualitative. A search was made for the frequency of personal
pronouns, modality markers, mental verbs and negation in both speeches using a
Concordancer. The quantitative comparison showed that Obama’s speech had a
higher frequency of modality, especially epistemic modality, negation and first per-
son pronouns. In Bush’s speech negation was infrequent and you was more frequent
than other pronouns. It is argued that Obama’s speech can be interpreted as an
attempt to ‘recontextualise’ the position of the US policy towards the Middle East.
Negation in Obama’s speech is for example used to correct assumptions about the
US by Arabic speakers or about the relations between the US and the Arabic coun-
tries. Obama’s frequent use of modal auxiliaries indicates his personal involvement
with the topic addressed. Bush’s speech, on the other hand, shows a more conven-
tional discourse style characterized by a low frequency of stance markers and nega-
tion and a preference for second person pronouns. The preference for unmodalized
assertions further underlines an authoritative speaking style.
Metadiscourse has been frequently used to characterise academic genres. Tereza
Guziurová draws on the ‘integrative’ or broad approach to metadiscourse in order
to compare the distribution and uses of the engagement markers we and you, imper-
atives, questions in academic textbooks and research articles. The discussion focuses
on the pronoun we since this proved to be the most frequent engagement marker in
the data accounting for about 70% in both genres. We was used with a wide range of
semantic reference with different discourse functions depending on the genre. The
majority of examples of we in both genres referred to the writer and his/her readers.
The main reason for using the pronoun in the textbooks is that it draws students into
the shared world of disciplinary understanding. Another reason is that we helps to
make the exposition more interesting, relevant and approachable by referring to
people in general as language users. In research articles the writer uses we with the
aim of disguising him/herself as the agent. The study also discusses the potential
advantages and drawbacks of the integrative approach.
References
Aijmer, K. (2008). Parallel and comparable corpora. In A. Lüdeling & M. Kytö (Eds.), Corpus
linguistics. An international handbook (Vol. 1, pp. 275–291). Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Baker, M. (1993). Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In
G. Francis, M. Baker, & E. T. Bonelli (Eds.), Text and technology: In Honour of John Sinclair
(pp. 233–252). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bhatia, V. K. (2002). Applied genre analysis: A multi-perspective model. Ibérica, 4, 3–19.
Baroni, M., & Bernardini, S. (2005). A new approach to the study of translationese: Machine-
learning the difference between original and translated text. Literary and Linguistic Computing,
21(3), 259–274.
Connor, U., Nagelhout, E., & Rozycki, W. V. (Eds.). (2008). Contrastive rhetoric: Reaching to
intercultural rhetoric. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Introduction 9
Dyvik, H. (1998). A translational basis for semantics. In S. Johansson & S. Oksefjell (Eds.),
Corpora and cross-linguistic research. Theory, method, and case studies. Amsterdam/Atlanta:
Rodopi.
Gast, V. (2012). Contrastive analysis: Theories and methods. In: B. Kortmann & J. Kabatek (Eds.),
Linguistic theory and methodology. (WSK-Dictionaries of Language and Communication
Science). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. http://www.personal.uni-jena.de/~mu65qev/papdf/
CA.pdf
Gast, V. (2015). On the use of translation corpora in contrastive linguistics. A case study of imper-
sonalization in English and German. Languages in Contrast, 15(1), 4–33.
González, G., de los Angeles, M., Lachlan Mackenzie, J., & Alvarez, E. G. (Eds.). (2008). Current
trends in contrastive linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gregory, M., & Carroll, S. (1978). Language and situation: Language varieties and their social
contexts. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Hinds, J. (1990). Inductive, deductive, quasi-inductive: Expository writing in Japanese, Korean,
Chinese, and Thai. In U. Connor & A. M. Johns (Eds.), Coherence in writing: Research and
pedagogical perspective, Alexandria (pp. 87–109). VA: TESOL.
Johansson, S. (2007). Seeing through multilingual corpora: On the use of corpora in contrastive
studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
König, E. (2011). The place of contrastive linguistics in language comparison. ms. http://www.
personal.uni-jena.de/~mu65qev/e-g-ontrasts/papers/koenig_2011.pdf
König, E., &. Gast (2009). Understanding English-German contrasts (2nd ed.). Berlin: Schmidt.
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Oxford: Blackwell.
Levinson, S. (1979). Activity types and language. Linguistics, 17, 365–379.
Mauranen, A. (2002). Where’s cultural adaptation? A corpus-based study on translation strategies.
In: B. Silvia & Z. Federico (Eds.) CULT2K, special issue of inTRAlinea. http://www.intralinea.
org/specials/article/1677
McEnery, T., & Xiao, R. (2008). Parallel and comparable corpora: What is happening? In
G. Anderman, & M. Rogers (Eds.), Incorporating corpora: The linguist and the translator
(pp. 18–31). Cleveland: Multilingual Matters.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge:
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and corpus perspectives. Sheffield: Equinox.
Part I
Contrastive Analysis with Parallel Corpora
The Semantic Field of Obligation
in an English-Swedish Contrastive Perspective
Karin Aijmer
Abstract The article examines how genre (fiction and non-fiction) affects the dis-
tribution and uses of the modal auxiliaries must/måste in the obligation meaning and
their more or less grammaticalized alternatives in English and Swedish. In both
languages the obligation markers were associated with specific contexts of use
depending on genre. In fiction the obligation markers were frequent with first and
second person subjects. Must was used for exhortations. Have to was used with
generic subjects and instead of must for more general recommendation. In Swedish
there was no corresponding distinction. Must usually pointed forwards to something
desirable in the context of EU debates. Have to, on the other hand, was also found
in negative contexts in the non-fiction data. Swedish måste was used both about
positive and negative obligation. In Swedish få was an alternative to måste when the
imposition was not in the hearer’s interest.
1 Introduction
In both English and Swedish the meaning of obligation can be expressed by a modal
auxiliary (must or Swedish måste). This is in line with ‘a significant cross-linguistic
trend for languages to have a category of grammatical expression forms, usually
called the “modal” auxiliaries’ (Nuyts 2016: 13). However must and måste are not
always each other’s translation equivalents reflecting the fact that there are a large
number of grammatical and lexical alternatives to express obligation.
The English modal auxiliaries have attracted a great deal of interest because of
their changing patterns over time. Less attention has been given to the codification of
certain functions which can take place in particular genres. However, Lewis (2015)
With many thanks to Bengt Altenberg for reading an earlier version of the text.
K. Aijmer (*)
University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
e-mail: karin.aijmer@eng.gu.se
in the state of affairs’ (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 81). Must is for example
deontic in the example below:
John must leave now
with the definition: ‘as far as the person with authority and /or the norm goes,
John’s leaving is necessary’ (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 83). The norms
here can be societal norms as well as moral assessments or judgements of desirabil-
ity (Nuyts 2016: 37).
An additional semantic domain is epistemic modality. The epistemic meaning of
must/måste has been defined in terms of a judgment by the speaker rather than in
terms of obligation: ‘a proposition is judged to be uncertain or probable in relation
to some judgment’ (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 81). The epistemic mean-
ing is illustrated by:
John must have arrived
Must (and måste) are available in all the domains. However all the epistemic
examples have been excluded from the investigation. They were less frequent than
the examples with obligation meaning and are mainly restricted to fiction.
In the present study I will focus on the importance of genre for understanding the
different frequencies and uses of the linguistic forms expressing obligation.
Following Biber (1988: 68) I will use the term ‘genre’ ‘to refer to text categoriza-
tions made on the basis of external criteria relating to author/speaker purpose’. The
genres used in the present study represent both fiction and non-fiction.
The data are taken from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) (Altenberg
and Aijmer 2001). The ESPC contains original texts in English and Swedish with
their translations, altogether 2.8 million words making direct comparisons between
the languages possible. The texts represent both fiction and non-fiction texts in
equal proportions. Fiction texts consist of dialogues. Non-fiction is a hyperonym
covering the subject areas memoirs and biography, geography, humanities, natural
sciences, social sciences, applied sciences, legal documents, prepared speech
(Altenberg et al. 2001). I will use translation paradigms as the starting-point and
then compare the most frequent markers of obligation in different contexts of use in
English and Swedish.
16 K. Aijmer
The corpus examples were selected in the following way. First all the examples of
måste and must were extracted from the original texts with their translations. On the
basis of the translations we can compare how obligation is expressed in the two
languages (in either fiction or non-fiction). Måste is, for example, not always trans-
lated as must but a large number of alternatives are found. At a second stage, I
examine the contexts and functions of the most important markers of obligation in
the two languages in both fiction and non-fiction
On the whole, both the auxiliaries were more frequent in non-fiction than in fic-
tion. Moreover, they were more frequent as obligation markers than as epistemic
auxiliaries (see Tables 1 and 2).
In non-fiction Swedish måste had obligation meaning in 96.3% of the examples
to be compared with must in 87.4% of the cases.
The smaller number of examples of must in the English texts is interesting against
the background that it has been claimed that must has declined in frequency within
a 30-year period during the last century and that it has been replaced by other ‘gram-
maticalizing’ elements (Leech et al. 2009).
Table 3 shows the correspondences of the Swedish måste in English (translations
of Swedish originals into English) and Table 4 (in Sect. 4.2) the correspondences of
English måste in Swedish (the translations from the English originals into Swedish).
Must, taking into account all its uses, was more frequent in non-fiction than in
fiction (see Table 2). This difference can be partly explained by the fact that there
are more occurrences of must with epistemic meaning in fiction (32.9% of the
examples were epistemic in fiction to be compared with only 12.6% in non-fiction).
Moreover, as noticed by the diachronic linguist, must has been replaced by have to
in many of its uses (Leech et al. 2009). A genre-type explanation of the discrepancy
is that must has a number of functions in non-fiction texts which are not paralleled
in the fiction texts.
Table 3 The English translations of Swedish måste (SO ->ET). Obligation meanings
ET fiction ET non-fiction Total
must 112 (30.4%) 357 (57.0%) 469 (48.3%)
have to 84 (22.8%) 85 (13.6%) 169 (17.4%)
had to 88 36 124
should 5 46 51
need to (or other forms with need)a 9 32 41
(have) got to 12 4 16
ought to 4 11 15
is (was) -ed 3 5 8
is necessary, essential – 8 8
be going to, will 4 1 5
be forced, be compelled, be made, be taken to – 4 4
x makes sb do sth 3 – 3
ø 4 – 4
other 6 27 33
Examples occurring once or twiceb 11 10 21
Total 345 626 971
a
Not all examples with need in the translations are semi-modals (cf ‘I need somone to talk to’).
b
The following examples occurred once or twice in either fiction or non-fiction: had better, neces-
sarily, of necessity, be in need of, be a need to, appreciate the need to, I should like to say, there is
no other way but, I cannot help but, be enough to, be due to, it was natural for X to do sth, it should
be incumbent on X to do sth, couldn’t possibly, emphatic do, it’s time, the imperative
to the frequency would have been even higher.) Other frequent obligation markers
are (have) got to, need to and should.
Several other expressions have different frequencies in fiction and non-fiction.
Need to, should and ought to are strikingly more frequent in non-fiction than in fic-
tion. Have got to, on the other hand, occurs above all in fiction.
1
Have to was for example translated into behöva (‘need to’) in three examples.
The Semantic Field of Obligation in an English-Swedish Contrastive Perspective 19
The translation paradigms provide only raw data. They do not provide any infor-
mation about the contexts in which must or its alternatives are chosen as a transla-
tion. In the following sections I will discuss must and its most frequent variants have
to and need and make comparisons with the Swedish correspondences. The
following research questions will be asked: Are the factors determining the distribu-
tion and uses of obligation markers in English and Swedish the same? Are the fac-
tors the same in fiction and non-fiction?
Must and måste can be regarded as ‘close relatives’ but they were not always trans-
lated into each other. Must was translated as måste in 74.8% of the cases but the
correspondence in the other direction was much lower (because of the existence of
English variants such as have to). In this section I will discuss must, have to and
need to as competitors in the fiction texts.
Must and have to often overlap in meaning. For example, the translator may have
chosen must but could also have opted for have to without any difference in mean-
ing. However, there are some contexts where must and have to seem to be doing
different things. With a first person subject the speaker is strongly involved in the
verbal action:
(1) Your mother is lucky she did not choose to eat corned beef on a Saturday
night. On Saturday nights we are extremely busy. Now I must go. A nurse
will be coming along soon.” (ST1)
Er mor kan skatta sig lycklig att hon inte valde en lördagkväll för att äta
corned beef. På lördagkvällarna är vi ytterst upptagna. Nu måste jag gå.
Det kommer snart en sjuksyster.” (ST 1T)
When have to is used the obligation requiring an action from the speaker is imposed
by external circumstances (non-deontic meaning). In (2) the speaker has been
watching the galleries for a long time and now feels obliged by the look of them to
‘work up to them’.
However although have to is not deontic it can be used instead of must with a first
person subject to soften the imposition of the action on the hearer. Will (‘ll) in com-
bination with have to makes the imposition more vague and less strong by placing
the action in the future:
20 K. Aijmer
(3) I ‘ll have to think on it and perhaps take a few soundings before I decide
where I can best place it. (FF1)
Jag måste fundera på det och kanske höra mig för här och var innan jag
bestämmer vart jag ska skicka det. (FF1T)
(4) You must allow me this chance in Provence to make up my mind. (BR1)
Du måste låta mig få den här chansen att bestämma mig i Provence. (BR1T)
In (5) the speaker is using have to rather than must because it is less impositive
and therefore more polite. Have to treats the action as negative (face-threatening)
and therefore in need of hedging. Placing the imposition in the future (you’ll have)
is another hedging strategy (cf. I’ll have to):
(5) Reliving, mentally, the events of three days earlier, Andrew said “You ‘ll
have to make allowance for my having been a little dazed at the time.” (AH1)
Andrew gick i tankarna igenom händelserna tre dagar tidigare och sade: “Du
måste tänka på att jag var litet förvirrad just då.” (AH1T)
However in other examples have to does not overlap with the deontic must but refers
to external circumstances (it is important or crucial that you hurry if you’ll get the
colour off the hair):
(6) Matilda said, “I ‘d give it a good wash, dad, if I were you, with soap
and water.
But you ‘ll have to hurry.”(RD1)
Matilda sa: “Om jag vore som du så skulle jag gå och tvätta igenom det
ordentligt, pappa, med tvål och vatten.
Men du blir tvungen att snabba på.”(RD1T)
Out of 34 examples with you as the subject 19 were translated by a generic pronoun
in Swedish making the obligation more vague or general (expressing little speaker
involvement).
In (8) the translator has used behöver (‘need’) to mark what needs to be done (put-
ting less imposition on the hearer):
(8) You only have to drive through the West Midlands to see that if we are in the
Super-League of top industrial nations, somebody must be moving
the goalposts. (DL1)
Man behöver bara köra genom West Midlands för att se att någon måste
ha flyttat på målsnöret för att placera oss i superligan av
industrinationer. (DL1T)
The obligation markers can come with a certain ‘evaluative prosody’ depending on
whether they are associated with something positive or negative (good or bad, desir-
able or undesirable) (Partington 2015).
When the subject has no control over the action have to can come to express
evaluation rather than obligation (Myhill and Smith 1995). In example (9), for
example, have to is chosen to suggest that sitting in the front is something
negative:
(9) He gets carsick and I do not, which is why he has to sit in the front. (MA1)
Han blir bilsjuk och det blir inte jag, det är därför han måste sitta i framsätet.
(MA1T)
In (10) the big bad wolf has to go somewhere else for his dinner (against his will).
(10) The big bad wolf has to go somewhere else to get his dinner; these little
piggies are home free.” (SK1)
Den stora stygga vargen får leta efter sin middag någon annanstans, dom
tre små grisarna har klarat sej.”(SK1T)
Need to and should (or ought to) and their Swedish correspondences encode a
weak deontic meaning (the speaker is open to the possibility that the obligation may
not result in an action). Unlike must these markers do not involve self-imposition (in
the first person) but communicate the speaker’s felt needs to do something
(participant-internal meaning). In non-fiction texts on the other hand need to and
should (ought to) were more frequent and sometimes translated with måste (signal-
ling strong obligation) (Sect. 6.1).
In the following sentence need to conveys that the subject did not feel the need
to sit down:
Need to can also signal the speaker’s positive attitude to the carrying out of the
action. With a generic second person subject need to can, for example, be inter-
preted as a recommendation:
(12) All you need to do is be prudent and not go there again. (RR1)
Allt man behöver göra är att vara försiktig och inte gå dit igen. (RR1T)
In (13) the speaker (a morgue attendant) uses need to rather than must or have to
with directive force:
(13) “We ‘ll need to know what arrangements you want made,” he said. (SG1)
“Vi behöver få veta hur ni vill arrangera begravningen”, sade han. (SG1T)
The authority imposed by the obligation marker is softened by the use of we (rather
than I) and by placing the time when the speaker needs to know in the future (cf. the
use of need to in non-fiction in Sect. 6.1).
The Swedish modal auxiliaries meaning obligation in the data analysed are måste,
få (‘may’), ska/skulle (‘shall’, ‘should’), bör/borde (‘ought to’) (referred to as deon-
tic modal auxiliaries in the Swedish reference grammar Teleman et al. 1999). Få is
also an auxiliary with the meaning permission (=may) and ska/skall has developed
future meaning. Translations can show whether they have been interpreted as hav-
ing an obligation meaning.
According to Teleman et al. (1999: 296), få can have ‘approximately the same
meaning as måste in situations where it is clear that the action referred to in the
sentence is not in the hearer’s interest’ (my translation). This makes it different from
permission (the action is in the hearer’s interest). Let us consider some example
sentences with obligation få and their translations into an obligation marker in
English:
If the subject is the second person the verb has the illocutionary force of a
speaker-initiated directive. In (14) får conveys that the hearer does not intend to
open the gate willingly (it is not in his interest to do so):
(15) Men han hade varit medvetslös en god stund och Birger ville inte ta nån
risk.— Du får åka till lasarettet, sa han.
Det hade Vidart ingenting emot.(KE1)
But he had been unconscious for quite a while, so Birger was taking no risks.
“You must go to hospital,” he said.
Vidart had no objections, but he was worried about the milk. (KE1T)
In (16) the action is treated as unwelcome to the hearer (‘you must show me the
harbour even if it involves some extra effort for you’). Få is therefore used with
persuasive force:
In all the examples of få some kind of negative evaluation takes place. Forgiving and
forgetting (an injustice) are a necessary evil if one is to survive.
(17) För man får glömma och förlåta om man ska överleva och förresten hade
priset på potatisen stigit till nästan två kronor för en tunna. (KE2)
One must forgive and forget if one is to survive, not to mention that the
price of potatoes had risen to nearly two kronor a barrel. (KE2T)
Behöva (‘need to’) is found in different patterns with different meanings.2 When
the subject is the first person the verb refers to a need felt by the speaker:
(18) Men jag behöver prata med dig några minuter. (HM2)
“I need to talk to you about something.” (HM2T)
The source of the need can be internal or external. In (19) the translator has chosen
have to indicating that the source is external (for example that the speaker needs the
cassette to make recordings) and to soften the imposition of the action:
2
Behöver was found as a translation equivalent of have to but not of must.
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purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having
emboldened us to trust ourselves to take delight in simple things,
and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It
needs not to
XII
Whether, as some philosophers here assume, we possess only the
fragments of a great cycle of knowledge, in whose center stood the
primeval man in friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and
build our hovels out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether,
according to the developing theory of others, we are rising gradually
and have come up from an atom instead of descending from an
Adam, so that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a
zoöphyte at last, are questions which will keep for a good many
centuries yet. Confining myself to what little we can learn from
History, we find tribes rising slowly out of barbarism to a higher or
lower point of culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also is
found under one name or another, changing in certain outward
respects, but essentially the same.
But however far we go back, we shall find this also—that the poet
and the priest were united originally in the same person: which
means that the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit
as well as that of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to
men. This was his highest function, and hence his name of seer.
I suppose the word epic originally meant nothing more than this, that
the poet was the person who was the greatest master of speech. His
were the ἔπεα πτερόεντα, the true winged words that could fly down
the unexplored future and carry thither the names of ancestral
heroes, of the brave, and wise, and good. It was thus that the poet
could reward virtue, and, by and by, as society grew more complex,
could burn in the brand of shame. This is Homer’s character of
Demodocus in the eighth book of the “Odyssey,”
When the Muse loved and gave the good and ill,
The first histories were in verse, and, sung as they were at the feasts
and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the desire of fame,
which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust, because it
teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the future.
We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they
were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for
their ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said only two
centuries ago: “When I read Homer I feel as if I were twenty feet
high.”
Nor have poets lost their power over the future in modern times.
Dante lifts up by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith and
Brown of some provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare
upon it for a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of
mankind. The historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard III. as
smooth as they can; they will never get over the wrench that
Shakspeare gave them.
The poet’s gift, then, is that of seer. He it is that discovers the truth
as it exists in types and images; that is the spiritual meaning, which
abides forever under the sensual. And his instinct is to express
himself also in types and images. But it was not only necessary that
he himself should be delighted with his vision, but that he should
interest his hearers with the faculty divine. Pure truth is not
acceptable to the mental palate. It must be diluted with character and
incident; it must be humanized in order to be attractive. If the bones
of a mastodon be exhumed, a crowd will gather out of curiosity; but
let the skeleton of a man be turned up, and what a difference in the
expression of the features! Every bystander then creates his little
drama, in which those whitened bones take flesh upon them and
stalk as chief actor.
The poet is he who can best see or best say what is ideal; what
belongs to the world of soul and of beauty. Whether he celebrates
the brave and good, or the gods, or the beautiful as it appears in
man or nature, something of a religious character still clings to him.
He may be unconscious of his mission; he may be false to it, but in
proportion as he is a great poet, he rises to the level of it more often.
He does not always directly rebuke what is bad or base, but
indirectly, by making us feel what delight there is in the good and fair.
If he besiege evil it is with such beautiful engines of war (as Plutarch
tells us of Demetrius) that the besieged themselves are charmed
with them. Whoever reads the great poets cannot but be made better
by it, for they always introduce him to a higher society, to a greater
style of manners and of thinking. Whoever learns to love what is
beautiful is made incapable of the mean and low and bad. It is
something to be thought of, that all the great poets have been good
men. He who translates the divine into the vulgar, the spiritual into
the sensual, is the reverse of a poet.
It seems to be thought that we have come upon the earth too late;
that there has been a feast of the imagination formerly, and all that is
left for us is to steal the scraps. We hear that there is no poetry in
railroads, steamboats, and telegraphs, and especially in Brother
Jonathan. If this be true, so much the worse for him. But, because he
is a materialist, shall there be no poets? When we have said that we
live in a materialistic age, we have said something which meant
more than we intended. If we say it in the way of blame, we have
said a foolish thing, for probably one age is as good as another; and,
at any rate, the worst is good enough company for us. The age of
Shakspeare seems richer than our own only because he was lucky
enough to have such a pair of eyes as his to see it and such a gift as
his to report it. Shakspeare did not sit down and cry for the water of
Helicon to turn the wheels of his little private mill there at the
Bankside. He appears to have gone more quietly about his business
than any playwright in London; to have drawn off what water-power
he wanted from the great prosy current of affairs that flows alike for
all, and in spite of all; to have ground for the public what grist they
want, coarse or fine; and it seems a mere piece of luck that the
smooth stream of his activity reflected with ravishing clearness every
changing mood of heaven and earth, every stick and stone, every
dog and clown and courtier that stood upon its brink. It is a curious
illustration of the friendly manner in which Shakspeare received
everything that came along, of what a present man he was, that in
the very same year that the mulberry tree was brought into England,
he got one and planted it in his garden at Stratford.
It is perfectly true that this is a materialistic age, and for this very
reason we want our poets all the more. We find that every
generation contrives to catch its singing larks without the sky’s
falling. When the poet comes he always turns out to be the man who
discovers that the passing moment is the inspired one, and that the
secret of poetry is not to have lived in Homer’s day or Dante’s, but to
be alive now. To be alive now, that is the great art and mystery. They
are dead men who live in the past, and men yet unborn who live in
the future. We are like Hans-in-Luck, forever exchanging the
burthensome good we have for something else, till at last we come
home empty-handed. The people who find their own age prosaic are
those who see only its costume. And this is what makes it prosaic:
that we have not faith enough in ourselves to think that our own
clothes are good enough to be presented to Posterity in. The artists
seem to think that the court dress of posterity is that of Vandyke’s
time or Cæsar’s. I have seen the model of a statue of Sir Robert
Peel—a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding gracefully to
the present—in which the sculptor had done his best to travesty the
real man into a make-believe Roman. At the period when England
produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of this, and
we are thankful to the man who made the monument of Lord Bacon
that he had genius enough to copy every button of his dress,
everything down to the rosettes on his shoes. These men had faith
even in their own shoe-strings. Till Dante’s time the Italian poets
thought no language good enough to put their nothings into but Latin
(and, indeed, a dead tongue was the best for dead thoughts), but
Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men
bargained, and scolded, and made love, good enough for him, and
out of the world around him made such a poem as no Roman ever
sang.
We cannot get rid of our wonder, we who have brought down the
wild lightning from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven to be
our errand-boy and penny postman. In this day of newspapers and
electric telegraphs, in which common-sense and ridicule can
magnetise a whole continent between dinner and tea, we may say
that such a phenomenon as Mahomet were impossible; and behold
Joe Smith and the State of Deseret! Turning over the yellow leaves
of the same copy of Webster on “Witchcraft” which Cotton Mather
studied, I thought, Well, that goblin is laid at last! And while I mused,
the tables were dancing and the chairs beating the devil’s tattoo all
over Christendom. I have a neighbor who dug down through tough
strata of clay-slate to a spring pointed out by a witch-hazel rod in the
hands of a seventh son’s seventh son, and the water is sweeter to
him for the wonder that is mixed with it. After all, it seems that our
scientific gas, be it never so brilliant, is not equal to the dingy old
Aladdin’s lamp.
It is impossible for men to live in the world without poetry of some
sort or another. If they cannot get the best, they will get at some
substitute for it. But there is as much poetry as ever in the world if we
can ever know how to find it out; and as much imagination, perhaps,
only that it takes a more prosaic direction. Every man who meets
with misfortune, who is stripped of his material prosperity, finds that
he has a little outlying mountain-farm of imagination, which does not
appear in the schedule of his effects, on which his spirit is able to
keep alive, though he never thought of it while he was fortunate. Job
turns out to be a great poet as soon as his flocks and herds are
taken away from him.
Perhaps our continent will begin to sing by and by, as the others
have done. We have had the Practical forced upon us by our
condition. We have had a whole hemisphere to clear up and put to
rights. And we are descended from men who were hardened and
stiffened by a downright wrestle with Necessity. There was no
chance for poetry among the Puritans. And yet if any people have a
right to imagination, it should be the descendants of those very
Puritans. They had enough of it, or they could not have conceived
the great epic they did, whose books are States, and which is written
on this continent from Maine to California.
This lesson I learn from the past: that grace and goodness, the fair,
the noble, and the true will never cease out of the world till the God
from whom they emanate ceases out of it; that the sacred duty and
noble office of the poet is to reveal and justify them to man; that as
long as the soul endures, endures also the theme of new and
unexampled song; that while there is grace in grace, love in love,
and beauty in beauty, God will still send poets to find them, and bear
witness of them, and to hang their ideal portraitures in the gallery of
memory. God with us is forever the mystical theme of the hour that is
passing. The lives of the great poets teach us that they were men of
their generation who felt most deeply the meaning of the Present.
I have been more painfully conscious than any one else could be of
the inadequacy of what I have been able to say, when compared to
the richness and variety of my theme. I shall endeavor to make my
apology in verse, and will bid you farewell in a little poem in which I
have endeavored to express the futility of all effort to speak the
loveliness of things, and also my theory of where the Muse is to be
found, if ever. It is to her that I sing my hymn.
Mr. Lowell here read an original poem of considerable length, which
concluded the lecture, and was received with bursts of applause.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES ON
ENGLISH POETS ***
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