EPENTHETIC VERBS AS DISCOURSE CONTROL MARKERS (BASED ON JAPANESE TRANSLATIONS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE)

Abstract

This paper studies Japanese translations of several classical works of Russian literature to treat the issue of equivalency between discourse control markers between languages. The Russian verbs for hearing, seeing, knowing and understanding when used epenthetically display a common discourse function of representing a certain communicative stance of the speaker, as well as his intentions to control the cognitive state of the addressee. However, in Japanese we find no lexical group exactly analogous to them. This raises the problem of specifying such semantic and pragmatic features in the verbal epenthesis in Russian that would guide the process of filling the corresponding lacuna in Japanese – such as position of the utterance in the flow of discourse, the speaker’s intentions, his attitude toward the addressee, and the nature of the proposition. We find that the Japanese lexical means necessary to make explicit those features include a variety of communicative particles, interjections, conjunctions and modal adverbs – while the status of questions with cognitive verbs, parallel to the Russian speech convention, is rather marginal.