Aims, Methodology and Data

The present study aims to investigate the role of modal adverbs of certainty in the Opinions of Advocates General and to explore their polysemy based on the translation patterns found in English and Polish data. In particular, an attempt will be made to answer the following questions:

1. What conventional and context-specific meanings of modal adverbs of certainty are revealed by the bilingual data under study?
2. How frequent are omissions in the translations of these adverbs and what effect do these omissions have on the argumentative force of the translated texts?

Since in addressing the above issues corpus data will be used, it must be remembered that various types of corpora (e.g. bilingual or multilingual) are widely applied in contrastive and translation studies for theoretical or practical purposes. While theoretically-oriented research investigates the manner in which the same ideas are transmitted in various languages, practically-oriented explorations aim, for instance, to develop machine translation and computer-assisted translation systems. It should also be highlighted that, as held by Grisot and Moeschler (2014: 13), corpora allow “the researcher to uncover on the one hand, what is probable and typical and, on the other hand, what is unusual about the phenomenon considered.”

At this point, a note clarifying the meaning of parallel corpora is in order, especially given that there is some confusion related to this term.^[1] The terminology adopted for the purposes of the current study is in line, for instance, with Baker (1999), Hunston (2002) and McEnery and Xiao (2007), who draw a distinction between a comparable corpus and a parallel corpus. In this approach, a comparable corpus is defined as one with “the same proportions of the texts of the same genres in the same domains in a range of different languages in the same sampling period” (McEnery and Xiao 2007: 20). Thus, the subcorpora composing a comparable corpus are not translations but rather, they use the same sampling frame and show “similar balance and representativeness.” As regards the definition of a parallel corpus, in the case of which the sampling period is irrelevant, the same linguists hold that the term refers to “a corpus that contains source texts and their translations” and which can be either bilingual or multilingual (McEnery and Xiao 2007: 19). What is more, as McEnery and Xiao (2007: 19) see it, parallel corpora can be unidirectional, bi-directional or multi-directional, the latter including texts which are written simultaneously in different languages. Going further, McEnery and Xiao (2007: 20) subdivide parallel corpora into general and specialised ones, stressing that specialised parallel corpora (including, for instance, contract law texts) are particularly useful in domain-specific translation research.

Understandably, regardless of their subtype, parallel corpora offer possibilities of monolingual and cross-linguistic analyses of various discourse-pragmatic phenomena and this applies to the usage of modal adverbs, too. At this point it might be reiterated that a cross-linguistic approach to the study of modal adverbs, involving translations and back-translations, enables scholars to establish meaning relations within the semantic field of uncertainty (Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer 2007: 1) by reflecting the meaning of the adverbs in the other language. In a wider perspective, the usefulness of a parallel corpus lies, then, in the possibility for the researcher of discovering translations which “constitute paradigms representing a broad spectrum of meanings”; to “get more correspondences or meanings than if we consult a dictionary or use introspection” and to “get information about what meanings of the source item are most frequent or salient” (Aijmer 2007: 333). This view is followed in the current study aimed at revealing correspondences between selected English modal adverbs and their Polish equivalents, as used in argumentative legal writing.

Turning now to the corpus design, the material used for analysis consists of 30 Opinions of the Advocates General at the European Court of Justice, issued between 2011 and 2013, comprising about 576,000 words. In order to discover subtle meaning distinctions and to arrive at conventionalised and context-bound readings of the adverbs under scrutiny, I have drawn data from aligned corpora and compared translations from English into Polish. In other words, I have used a parallel corpus (containing source texts in English and their Polish translations) which is specialised (representing one legal genre, i.e. Opinions of Advocates General), bilingual (including English and Polish data) and uni-directional (containing translations from English into Polish). The English texts of the Opinions were written by a native speaker of English,^[2] whereas the Polish texts were translations made by Polish professionals translating the texts of the Opinions into their mother tongue.

The genre of Opinion was used, since it was believed that this form of legal writing would be rife with persuasive devices and author visibility marking. This was attributed to the fact that the Opinions serve primarily “to persuade the Court that the solution proposed is well founded from a legal point of view and [that] the court’s rulings should be based on it” and, further, “to persuade the litigants that the rulings of the Court which follow are based on a thoroughly and justly argued legal Opinion, and therefore, are the right decisions” (Salmi-Tolonen 2005: 66). As for the classification of modal adverbs of certainty adopted in the present study, it follows Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007), who distinguish four clusters: epis- temic (e.g. certainly, definitely, indeed), evidential (e.g. obviously, clearly, plainly), expectation (e.g. of course, naturally, inevitably) and speech act adverbs (e.g. admittedly, undeniably, indisputably).

Finally, it should also be noted that the range of the data used in the study was limited and that, therefore, further research is needed for valid generalisations to be made. Still, despite this limitation, it is believed that they offer insight into the polysemy of modal adverbs of certainty and that they can therefore be relevant to future investigations focusing on other languages, discourses or genres.

[1] For a discussion on the various labels used to describe different types of multilingual corpora, seeMcEnery and Xiao (2007).
[2] As there is only one British Advocate General at the ECJ, the Opinions used to compile the corpuswere written by one person. However, this fact appears to have no bearing on the results, since thefocus of the analysis is on the translation process.