What is it about?
The paper looks at the differences and similarities of how two different sets of texts use the same pragmatic marker.
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Why is it important?
The pragmatic marker "vajon" has no counterpart in English, and for this reason, its use in translated texts cannot be explained by cross-linguistic reasons. Which means that if there is a difference in how different translated texts use it, that must be down to a specific quality of the texts themselves. Such a quality is established by this paper. One set of translated texts shows a preference for marking interrogative polarity as compared to the other. The use of the pragmatic marker "vajon" is possibly connected to such a preference. These preferences, however, most probably are specific to genre, register, etc., rather than to translated language as such.
Perspectives
The marker "vajon" seems to be a marker of idea clauses (idea clause is understood in the sense of Halliday & Matthiessen 2014). Its use must be impacted by not just whether a text (of a specific genre, register, etc.) has a preference for such clauses, but also by how important and how frequent such clauses are in the given genre, register, etc.
Andrea Götz
Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegyetem
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Vajon in Translated Hungarian, January 2016, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/ausp-2016-0029.
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