STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH COMPARATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN INTERNET TRANSPORT TEXTS: TRANSLATION ASPECTS

The article is aimed at investigating structural and semantic features of English comparative constructions in internet transport texts to faithfully convey them into Ukrainian. In the process of research, the method of theoretical sources analysis, the contextual method of studying original internet texts, the componential method, the method of translation interpretation of the results were employed. As a result of the research, the most common comparative constructions of inequality (25% of the total number of cases) with qualitative adjectives in the comparative degree were classified into four types according to structural and semantic criteria with the identification of five components: comparee – marker – parameter – index – standard. It was found that comparatives of equality with adjectives – parameters in the positive degree account for 15%, in the superlative degree – 20%. The comparatives of inequality with numerals (25%) that function as parameters describe decreasing or increasing figures in percent and in compound cardinal numerals. Implicit comparatives (15%) were described in lexico-semantic oppositions in the context of simple sentences and a passage. It was noted that comparees and standards are mostly expressed by terminological noun clusters while parameters are represented by adjectives and numerals, thus udergoing transformations in translation, with markers and indexes mainly rendered through equivalent translation. The most common translation ways turned out to be permutation and transposition for five types of comparatives. It was substantiated that translation models of combined transformations faithfully convey English comparative constructions into Ukrainian. To sum up, comparative constructions are complex syntactic units of evaluative semantics that were classified into two types based on equality and inequality of features of a comparee and a standard. The most applicable ways and models were identified to faithfully render English comparatives into the target language in compliance with structural and semantic features of their components.