Functional and Semantic Potential of ‘Noun + Go/Sit/Lay + Negative Participle II’ Constructions and the Ways of Translating Them

Abstract

The research aims at defining functional and semantic potential of ‘noun + go/sit/lay + negative Participle II’ constructions and the ways of translating them into Russian. Language material obtained from Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is processed with the help of the method of collostructional analysis, which combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The constructions under study have grammatical and collocational restrictions and can be considered as quasi-passive. Left context collocates of the constructions usually form several intersecting lexical semantic domains. Right context collocates represent a dynamic scenario of prototypical interactive situations related to the left context domains. The verbs go, sit, lay cannot be used in Continuous tenses as a result of coercion. The constructions can be translated into Russian in various ways due to usage-based and typological constructional differences between the languages. The work draws on achievements and problems of constructional approach applied to translation. The paper discusses development and prospects of research in construction grammar for finding a solution to practical issues in translation including cataloging of existing constructions in typologically different languages, matching constructions in various languages using parallel tagged corpora, defining unique constructions specific to certain languages and giving a detailed description of their pragmatic, stylistic functional and semantic features.

Keywords

• translation
• constructional approach
• automatic machine translation
• collostructional analysis
• quasi-passive constructions
• corpus databases
• construction grammar