Abstract
This paper presents a contrastive study of Norwegian predications of motion events with the compound prepositions ut av (‘out of’) and inn i (‘into’) and their translations into English and French. The motivation for choosing these two types of predication is that French, unlike English, is said to avoid the use of manner verbs with boundary-crossing events. The paper examines all occurrences in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC) of self-motion predications containing the two Norwegian prepositions, in all of which path is coded in the prepositional phrase. The verb may also code path, it may code manner, or it may be a neutral verb of movement. We first analyse the Norwegian originals with respect to their coding of path and manner and then turn to the two sets of translations and investigate the extent to which they retain the manner/path coding choices of the source predications and, if not, what sort of alterations they make. If the contention that French avoids manner verbs with boundary-crossing actions is correct, the French translations should exhibit a much greater degree of path or neutral motion coding in the verb than either the Norwegian originals or the English translations. The data show that this is indeed the case. There are also, however, more occurrences of manner verbs in French with boundary-crossing actions than one would expect given the language’s reputation in the literature for avoiding this construction.
Highlights
In this paper we compare and contrast English and French translations of Norwegian predications of motion events containing the boundarycrossing compound prepositions ut av (‘out of’) and inn i (‘into’)
We have only looked at the Norwegian originals and English and French translations
We looked at all tokens of self-motion predications containing the two Norwegian prepositions ut av and inn i, in all of which path is coded in the prepositional phrase
Summary
In this paper we compare and contrast English and French translations of Norwegian predications of motion events containing the boundarycrossing compound prepositions ut av (‘out of’) and inn i (‘into’). Predications of non-telic motion events, such as those containing paths coded in English and French by prepositional phrases headed by the prepositions towards/vers are more likely to be deemed acceptable with manner verbs in path-framing languages than those. Given the differences between French, a path-framed language, on the one hand and Norwegian and English, two satellite-framed languages on the other, one might expect to find more evidence of this lack of reconstruals in the French translations, at least if Cappelle (2012) is correct in his assertion that translators will often retain the coding of the source text, where this is typologically possible. Verbs that are not motion verbs, such as a verb of location encoding the position of the subject after the act of motion rather than the get, find, be act of motion itself
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