Spatial Deictics and Translational Implicitation: Evidence from a Corpus-based Analysis of English and Lithuanian Fictional Discourse

Abstract

Based on the typology of universal uses of demonstratives and presumption of translational explicitation, this paper compares and contrasts demonstratives from a semantic and pragmatic perspective. It aims to identify the translation correspondences of the English demonstratives in Lithuanian and contrast their usage in a comparable corpus to determine the cross-linguistic differences resulting from unequal distribution of lexical correspondences in both languages. This paper analyses a self-compiled parallel corpus and comparable corpus extracted from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language to examine the translation effects at the discourse pragmatic level in the rendition of spatial deixis. The translation correspondences highlight the key role of optional implicitation caused by the availability of contextual variants in the textual uses of demonstratives in Lithuanian. The translation results also reveal that the Lithuanian three-way system of demonstratives shows signs of reduction to a two-way system, as there is an analogous distribution between the English distal demonstrative and the neutral (medial) demonstrative in Lithuanian. A comparison of original texts points to important cross-linguistic differences determined by discourse-related factors, such as higher frequencies of demonstratives in the anaphoric and recognitional functions in Lithuanian texts, which is largely determined by the unmarked status of the neutral (medial) demonstrative. While its article-like status is gaining increasing attention in the literature, the present results indicate that the (neutral) medial demonstrative is an optional indicator of identification that occurs as a stylistic and text-building preference and contributes to greater textual pragmatic explicitness of Lithuanian fiction texts.