La traduzione di marcatori pragmatici derivati da verbi di percezione nelle lingue romanze: un approccio contrastivo

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the Romance functional equivalents of some English attention getting devices pragmaticalized out of perception verbs (look, see, listen, and hear) in a parallel corpus of French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian translations of four Harry Potter’s books. The use of parallel corpora is a valid heuristic tool to identify the values of pragmatic elements in different languages and compare their semantic core, which is often sub-specified and difficult to describe by taking into account only a single language. Parallel translations play a crucial role in this respect, since they allow us to identify different ‘potential’ pragmatic meanings through the lens of functional equivalents in other languages, and therefore to make explicit the different components which coexist and interact within the procedural nucleus of a given linguistic element. In our comparative study we highlight the main values developed by this class of pragmatic markers in the languages considered, also describing their different degrees of pragmaticalization and how different languages ‘cut up’ in various ways the pragmatic space which perception verbs give rise to.