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In:Cross-linguistic Correspondences: From lexis to genre
Edited by Thomas Egan and Hildegunn Dirdal
[Studies in Language Companion Series 191] 2017
► pp. 177–198

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Chapter 7
Reportive evidentials in English and Lithuanian

What kind of correspondence?

 | Vilnius University
 | Vilnius University
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.191.07uso
Abstract
The paper is concerned with lexical realizations of reportive evidentiality (Boye and Harder 2009; Celle 2009; Wiemer 2007; Aikhenvald 2008; Wiemer 2010b; Boye 2012) across different discourse types and languages. Our aim is to see how language specific the realizations and conceptualization of indirect reportive evidentiality are by contrasting the findings of the analysis of the data collected from various monolingual and parallel corpora. One of the purposes of this contrastive analysis is to find out what kind of correspondence one can expect when dealing with the reportive sub-domain of the linguistic category of evidentiality. The analysis is focused on the hearsay adverbs in English (reportedly, allegedly, supposedly) and Lithuanian adverbials neva ‘allegedly’, tariamai ‘supposedly’, esą ‘allegedly’ as well as their bi-directionally established translation correspondences (comment clauses, complement-taking predicates, as-parentheticals, etc.). The present study is corpus-based and makes use of quantitative and qualitative methods of research. The Lithuanian data have been drawn from the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian (CorALit) and from the spoken, news and fiction sub-corpora of the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language (CCLL). The English data have been extracted from the British National Corpus (BYU-BNC). To establish translation correspondences between the items under study, a parallel bidirectional fiction corpus ParaCorpEN-LT-EN, and a collection of translations from English into Lithuanian of EU documents (Glosbe) have been used. Our findings indicate that both sets of adverbials are mainly used in written language (news and academic discourse in English and news discourse and fiction in Lithuanian); however, there is very weak equivalence in their translation correspondences. The question is raised whether the Lithuanian adverbials can be regarded as reportive evidentials.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and method
    • 2.1The corpora
    • 2.2Data selection criteria
  • 3.Findings
    • 3.1Quantitative findings
    • 3.2The analysis of translation correspondences in Glosbe
    • 3.3The analysis of TCs in ParaCorpEN-LT-EN : Mutual correspondence
  • 4.Concluding observations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • Data sources
  • References
  • References
References (39)
Data sources
BNC: Davies, Mark. 2004-. BYUBNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). <[URL]>
CCLL: Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language <[URL]>
CorALit: Corpus of Academic Lithuanian <[URL]>
Glosbe: Multilingual Online Dictionary <[URL]>
EU Parliamentary proceedings ( Europarl8 – A Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation, Philipp Koehn, MT Summit 2005)
European Community legislation texts ( EUR-Lex; The Official Journal of the European Union)
ParaCorp en-lt-en Parallel: Bidirectional English-Lithuanian Fiction Corpus (Usonienė & Šolienė 2010)
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