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Russian feminatives with expressive suffixes -ixa, -ša and their Czech translation equivalents: a corpus study

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Abstract

The article focuses on the analysis of expressive Russian feminatives with suffixes -ixa and -ša and their translation equivalents in Czech. The research hypothesis is the assumption that Russian feminatives with the suffixes -ixa and -ša have inherent expressiveness, which is either lost in the Czech translation, or turns into contextual expressiveness (i.e. it is expressed using other linguistic means than the expressive feminative suffix). In the first part of the article, an overview of relevant theories of linguistic expressiveness and expressive motivation is given, and word-forming ways of creating feminatives in both languages are also highlighted. The next part of the article presents the results of corpus data research obtained while working with the parallel corpus InterCorp v13 (Russian and aligned corpus Czech). Lexemes with the given suffixes were extracted and the frequency of their use in fiction texts whose original language is Russian (InterCorp v13 – Russian) and translated texts (aligned parallel corpus InterCorp v13 – Czech) was presented: a total of 9 lemmas with the suffix -ixa were found and 28 lemmas with the suffix -ša. The extracted lemmas with the suffixes -ixa and -ša were analyzed from the word-formation and lexical-semantic point of view (in this analysis, emphasis was placed, among other things, on translation strategies) and thus the hypothesis posed at the beginning of the corpus research was confirmed.

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Notes

  1. Examples of feminatives with the mentioned word-forming formants -ka, -ša, -essa, -ica were found in the ruTenTen corpus, which contains over 18 billion tokens, see Jakubíček et al. (2013) for more details on the TenTen series corpora.

  2. We did not work, for example, with a parallel subcorpus within the Russian National Corpus, URL: https://ruscorpora.ru/new/search-para.html?lang=ces.

  3. A related concept is emotionalism, see Grepl (1975) and Klivar (1985), but emotionality usually refers to the expression of positive or negative emotions and has a narrower meaning than expressiveness (Křístek, 2017).

  4. For one of the most important works dealing with expressiveness in language we consider Potts (2007), where expressives are processed from the point of view of logic and within the formal theory of expressives the following form concepts (a term by Potts) of expressives are distinguished: types, expressive indices, contexts, domains, context shifting, denotations, compositional interpretation (2007: 183–189).

  5. We are aware that the term evaluative morphology is regularly used in linguistics, e.g. Grandi and Körtvélyessy (2015), but nonetheless we will follow the Czech and Russian linguistic tradition, where the terms expressive and expressiveness are regularly used.

  6. Bednaříková bases her analysis of linguistic expressiveness in the main news sessions in the Czech Republic on Furdíkʼs classification (1987) and extends it to another species: a) unmarked base-word + marked formant (Němč-our), (b) marked base-word + unmarked formant (třísk-ot, pitom-ost), c) marked base-word + marked formant (chlast-oun), see more in Bednaříková (2020: 85). For other examples of expressive motivation, see (Ološtiak, 2019).

  7. “When the stylistic function is realized, the derivate differs from the primary word only in its stylistic nuance. Thus, in Russian, there are pairs of lexemes identical in their meaning, in which the primary word is stylistically neutral, while its derivate is of a colloquial character” (Petrukhina & Karpilovska, 2021).

  8. The original Russian term is proizvodjaščaja osnova, which corresponds most closely to the translation motivating (underlying) stem.

  9. Of great interest are the reflections in Manova (2015) about affix order domains in the Slavic word: (prefix) – base – (derivational suff): nonevaluative/evaluative – (thematic marker) – (inflectional suff).

  10. The occurrence of the expressive unique suffixes -era, -icha, -ola, -ule is rare, and only some of them form the names of persons, e.g. chudý ‘poor’ > chuděra/chudera ‘poor soul (expr.)’, štětka ‘whore’ > štěťule ‘whore (expr.)’, Eva ‘proper noun (fem.)’ > Evule ‘proper noun (fem. + expr.)’ (Štícha, 2018b).

  11. The goal of our research is the analysis of feminatives in the original (original) Russian text and their equivalents in Czech translations, i.e. we examine only one translation dimension, namely the original text – translation 1. If we did not use the text.srclang (ru) filter, we would have more feminative examples, incl. those that are already translated (they are translations), i.e. we would work both with the dimension of the original text – translation 1, as well as with other dimensions such as original text – translation 2, translation 1 – translation 2.

  12. Russian linguists use the term rassoglasovanie ‘incongruence’, in Gerasimova and Lyutikova (2020: 34) we find the following models of syntactic incongruence:

    1. a)

      Prekrasnyj (masc.) novyj (masc.) učastkovyj (masc.) vrač (masc.) prišla (fem.) vovremja,

    2. b)

      Prekrasnyj (masc.) novyj (masc.) učastkovyj (masc.) vrač (masc.) prišёl (masc.) vovremja,

    3. с)

      Prekrasnaja (fem.) novaja (fem.) učastkovyj (masc.) vrač (masc.) prišla (fem.) vovremja,

    4. d)

      Prekrasnaja (fem.) novaja (fem.) učastkovaja (fem.) vrač (masc.) prišla (fem.) vovremja,

    5. *e)

      Prekrasnyj (masc.) novaja (fem.) učastkovyj (masc.) vrač (masc.) prišёl (masc.) vovremja,

    model *e) is not use.

  13. For more about the word-formation pattern ženščina-X nebo X-ženščina see Nesset et al. (2022).

  14. Both examples are taken from (C. Довлатов. Чемодан, 1990), transl. Liboř Dvořák, 1999.

  15. They are individual examples, often terms, e.g. vskryša’overburden’ (from vskryť).

  16. E.g. Nataša, Paša, Maša

  17. See also Nesset et al. (2022) on the stem-final {r, r’} as the trigger for -ša (based on the data from the Araneum corpus).

  18. “The place where individual morphemes come into contact in the structure is of extraordinary importance for the final formation of the structure – i.e. for the morphological synthesis of its components. We refer to this place as a morphematic boundary (morphologic boundary, juncture) […] The phonological means indicating that a morphematic boundary takes place in a given place fulfil the function of a boundary signal" (Straková, 1973: 30–31).

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    Anastasija Sokolova & Simona Koryčánková

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Sokolova, A., Koryčánková, S. Russian feminatives with expressive suffixes -ixa, -ša and their Czech translation equivalents: a corpus study. Russ Linguist 47, 41–59 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-023-09270-3

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