Publication details
The existential there-construction in Czech translations
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2007 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Existential sentences have different forms in English and in Czech. An English existential sentence typically consists of the existential particle there, followed by the verb to be, and an indefinite noun phrase functioning as the notional subject. The existential there has the status of a dummy subject fulfilling the grammatical, but not the semantic function of the subject. Czech existential sentences, by contrast, contain only one subject, i.e. the notional subject. The Czech language does not possess any formal means comparable to the existential particle there; the act of existence or occurrence is suggested by the intransitive character of the verb and the final position of the notional subject. The study examines existential sentences from the point of view of translation practice. In a corpus of parallel texts, it examines how Czech translators deal with English there-constructions, and what syntactic and semantic patterns they employ to achieve functional equivalence in Czech. |
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