Abstract
Modal adverbs of certainty are commonly found in argumentative writing, where they operate as stance markers and engagement devices guiding the readers towards the author’s intended interpretation. Such is also the case with legal opinions which abound in instances of explicit authorial marking, although, naturally, author visibility levels vary from language to language. This chapter examines the use of modal adverbs of certainty in judicial argumentation as attested by the English and Polish versions of the Opinions of Advocates General which represent EU legal discourse. To this end, a parallel corpus approach is used to explore “prototypical” meanings and context-dependent renderings of selected English adverbs in the Polish language and to investigate the effect that omissions of these adverbs have on the argumentative force of the translated texts. The study not only shows conventional and ad hoc meanings of the adverbs analysed, but also reveals differences between the author visibility levels and the rhetorical force of the original English texts and that of their translated Polish equivalents.
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Notes
- 1.
In agreement with this view, various interactional practices and linguistic resources have been explored to date, including, for instance, the role of I guess in conversational stancetaking (Kärkkäinen 2007), digressing (Kärkkäinen 2012), positioning and alignment in news interviews (Haddington 2007), resonance in storytelling (Niemelä 2011), challenging the prior speaker and tag questions (Keisanen 2006, 2007) as well as repetition and returning to prior talk (Rauniomaa 2007, 2008).
- 2.
Cf. the concept of prototypicality and prototype theory, as proposed by cognitive linguists (see, e.g., Geeraerts 2006).
- 3.
It is also demonstrated that although of course often serves as a solidarity device, it can also be used to assert authority and superiority of knowledge (Szczyrbak 2014: 97).
- 4.
- 5.
For a discussion on the various labels used to describe different types of multilingual corpora, see McEnery and Xiao (2007).
- 6.
As there is only one British Advocate General at the ECJ, the Opinions used to compile the corpus were written by one person. However, this fact appears to have no bearing on the results, since the focus of the analysis is on the translation process.
- 7.
For the purpose of the analysis, this category subsumes instances of negation + necessarily (e.g. not necessarily, cannot necessarily, without necessarily, etc.).
- 8.
In total, there were 78 occurrences of clearly including its non-modal use as an adverb of manner.
- 9.
Following the convention found in Barth-Weingarten (2003), whenever capitalised, Concession refers to the discourse-pragmatic relation, but when written with a lower-case letter, it denotes the interclausal relation.
- 10.
Remarkably, it was the most frequent translation strategy in the case of this adverb.
- 11.
As pointed out by Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007: 188), epistemic uses of necessarily and inevitably are infrequent.
- 12.
It is interesting to note that in the case of Swedish, Dutch and German correspondences of of course, the most frequent translations, as attested by Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007: 342-343), i.e. naturligtvis, natuurlijk and natürlich, respectively, are conventional equivalents of the English naturally, which suggests that “naturalness” or the fact of being “expected and accepted” is the most salient meaning of of course. This, however, is not corroborated by the Polish data analysed here, where only two instances of of course were translated as naturalnie (naturally).
- 13.
On the other hand, the non-modal use of clearly, typical of legalese and linked to explicitness (as in clearly defined or clearly indicate) was translated as wyraźnie (plainly/expressly) or jasno (plainly).
- 14.
Cf. the most common German translations of clearly and of course, that is deutlich and natürlich, respectively (Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer 2007: 331, 343), which indicate the difference between the two adverbs. In the Polish translations analysed here, this difference is less obvious.
- 15.
Only one such translation was attested by the data.
- 16.
Cf. Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007).
- 17.
Conveniently, in the case of EU legal discourse, multilingual corpora representing the official languages of the EU Member States are freely available to an analyst.
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Primary Sources
Opinions of Advocates General at the European Court of Justice. Downloaded from: http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/j_6/. Accessed 10 Jan 2014.
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Szczyrbak, M. (2017). Modal Adverbs of Certainty in EU Legal Discourse: A Parallel Corpus Approach. In: Aijmer, K., Lewis, D. (eds) Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54556-1_5
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