Russian contrastive pronouns in Polish translations: A corpus-based study

Evgeniya Budennaya
National Research University Higher School of Economics / Institute of Linguistics RAS

Abstract. The article discusses the implementation of marked subject pronouns after adversative conjunctions a and no in a parallel Russian-Polish corpus. The analysis compares Russian original sources, where subjective pronoun is obligatory, and their Polish translations (6 parallel texts, 428 entries). The study shows that the conditions for explicit realization of marked contrastive pronouns in pro-drop and non-pro-drop languages are different and likely influenced by the default pattern. Thus, the realization of the contrastive pronoun in Polish correlates with the degree of focus on the subject, which is higher in contexts with the conjunction a (lexemes “a of an abnormal consequence” and “a of comparison”). In these contexts, pronoun is translated into Polish much more often (χ-square, p-value <0.01).

Keywords: adversative conjunction, subject pronoun, personal pronoun, focus, Russian language, the Polish, parallel corpus

For citation: Budennaya E. Russian contrastive pronouns in Polish translations: A corpus-based study. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters. 2019. Vol. 2, iss. 2. Pp. 11–26. (In Rus.)