Kein italienisches dabei?

Abstract

The study describes Italian functional equivalents of the pronominal adverb dabei on the basis of InterCorp parallel corpora. The multifunctionality of German deictic-based pronominal adverbs, in particular of dabei, suggests such interlingual analyses. The present one confirms the wide range of options to translate dabei: verbal phrases (many with gerundio), very different and more or less lexicalised prepositional phrases in adverbial (only sporadic in conjunctive) function, especially with in and con as head, adverbs (most of them connective adverbs), lexical and syntactic additions, reformulations, (pseudo-)cleft sentences. Moreover, new insights into the correlations between several parameters for analysis have been gained, among them the following ones: dabei in Vorfeld-position is often rendered with marked syntactic constructions mostly conveying concession; dabei in Mittelfeld, on the other hand, seems to favour rendering through prepositional phrases. With reference to verbal phrases, Gerundio mainly goes along with temporal dabei, sometimes with further pragmatic nuances in the interpretation, whereas finite modes translate local dabei. Finally, the tendency to make the reading of dabei explicit can be observed.