Deontic Lexemes in the English Translations of the Works by Northern Russian Authors

Abstract

The article presents the findings of the study on deontic modality in the literary works by authors of the Russian North (F. Abramov, V. Lichutin, B. Shergin and S. Pisakhov) compared with their English translations. The research obtained a sample of microcontexts in which a deontic utterance has the form of an indicative sentence containing an explicit deontic lexeme both in the original text and in the translation. Further, a statistical analysis was performed, determining the frequency of use of various English deontic lexemes by translators when rendering Russian deontic lexemes most commonly occurring in the original texts. The results obtained were compared with the data on the frequency of matches between Russian and English deontic lexemes, determined by a similar analysis that used a chronologically diverse selection of Russian-English dictionaries as the source material (the publication date range of the dictionaries roughly corresponds to that of the English translations of the literary works under study). Having compared the frequency of use of correlating deontic lexemes in published translations and lexicographic sources, the author draws a conclusion about the influence of the translators’ interpretations of various communicative situations on the choice of a particular deontic lexeme during the translation process. In addition, the article provides an analysis of identified microcontexts containing deontic lexemes based on the ‘deontic source’ and ‘target subject’ criteria, along with a brief review of the theoretical sources that formed the modern understanding of deontic modality within linguistics.