| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系 === 103 === The study aimed: first, to investigate functions of a Russian connective i ‘and’ (Cyrillic: ‘и’) when used in an inter-clausal and inter-sentential position; second, to analyze how these functions are represented in corresponding English and Mandarin Chinese translations.
While i-structures with coordinate noun phrase constituents have received a lot of attention among Russian and overseas scholars (for example, Andreyewsky 1973, Chaves ＆ Paperno 2007, Osborne 2009, Paperno 2012, etc.), this thesis places the main focus on i-coordination of clauses and sentences, which has been under-investigated.
Conjunction i has been claimed to be polysemous and carrying various additional meanings along with its main function of expressing coordinative relations in their pure form (Shvedova et al. 1980; Vinogradov 2001). Some scholars argue that assumed polysemy is not a feature of the conjunction itself but rather arises from the surrounding context and other linguistic factors (for instance, Sannikov 2008). In either case, diversity of possible relations between i-coordinated clauses and sentences cannot be denied and constitutes one of the tasks to be solved by a translator.
Consequently, corpora of two types – monolingual and translation – were examined.
First, we provided an overview of previous accounts on i functions in lexicographic and other sources, followed by analysis of a sample from National Corpus of Russian Language in an attempt to finalize previous classifications and gain a full summary of non-classical readings of i. Second, we investigated Russian-English (by Constance Garnett and by Louise and Aylmer Maude) and Russian-Chinese (by Li Gang and by Chou Yang) translations of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” in order to see how and whether semantic and pragmatic functions of Russian i-constructions were transferred to a target text. We are guided by Degand’s (2009) claim that “translation data can be used to gain insight into the meaning of polysemous discourse markers” (p. 173).
Due to multi-functional and polysemous nature of English and (Caron 1999, Sweet 2005, de Vos 2007, etc.), it is the most frequent equivalent for i to be applied by translators. More variety can be observed in Russian-Chinese translation. While i in its main function as a simple coordinator is likely to be omitted in translation considering that asyndetic coordination is more preferred in Mandarin Chinese (Eifring 1995), in case when i has an additional meaning, conjunctions are added in the target text in order to explicitate implied discourse relations.
We believe that the results obtained from this study will contribute to a better understanding of Russian i-constructions by teachers and students learning Russian as a second language. Our analysis results will also find application in translation studies.
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