Concluding Remarks
As the study of bilingual data has shown, modal adverbs of certainty are polyse- mous, with more conventional meanings being enriched with ad hoc readings. It is clearly seen that apart from reflecting the author’s varied degrees of certainty, the adverbs are used for rhetorical and argumentative purposes, that is to convey authorial stance and to dialogue with alternative standpoints. To be precise, the analysis confirmed the canonical meanings of indeed, necessarily, not necessarily and of course, as reflected in the Polish translations w istocie, z koniecznosci, niekoniec- znie and oczywiscie, respectively. At the same time, somewhat surprisingly, it was established that indeed was translated non-conventionally as bowiem (for/because), which did not fit under the general meaning of this adverb. It was also remarkable to observe that sentence-initial and parenthetical occurrences of indeed were often left untranslated. Similarly, omission was the most common strategy in the case of necessarily. Not necessarily, conversely, was almost always retained in the translation, and so was of course, performing the role of a backgrounding device or a solidarity marker. As expected, both of course and indeed were found in Concessive contexts, in which they prefaced disagreement. Obviousness, in turn, seemed salient in the case of clearly, which conveyed authority and conviction, too. At the same time, it was noted, the distinction between of course and clearly appeared to be less visible than was the case in the translations into other languages.[1] Finally, the
Polish translations of obviously pointed to obviousness as its core meaning, rather than the evidential status of this adverb. In addition, the meanings conveyed by of course and obviously were expressed chiefly by one Polish adverb, that is oczywiscie, which blurred the difference between the as-everybody-knows meaning and the as- evidence-shows reading palpable in English.
Another point to note is that the degree of persuasiveness of the original Opinions and that of their Polish translations was not always the same. That is to say, it could be felt that the argumentative appeal of the Polish texts was often weaker than in the original opinions. For instance, it was observed that the author’s presence and personal authority, which were tangible in the English texts thanks to the use of the emphatic and authority-oriented necessarily and indeed (additionally strengthened by the co-occurring adjectives), were often absent in the Polish version. What is more, no differentiation was made in Polish between of course and obviously; therefore, authority and power linked to of course were no longer to be seen in the translated text. On the other hand, with regard to of course and not necessarily, where the number of omissions was the lowest, the rhetorical effect in English and in Polish appeared to be the same. Finally, it can be argued that the virtual non-occurrence of certainly and no doubt (with only 8 tokens each) was a meaningful absence, since the deployment of these adverbs might justifiably be expected in authority-based legal writing. This can, however, be attributed to the fact that although (most) certainly and no doubt are theoretically high certainty markers, speakers and writers often use them when their views are challenged and when they, in fact, are not certain at all.
To conclude, although the study presented here does not make any claim to being exhaustive, it sheds light on how modal adverbs of certainty are deployed for argumentative purposes in English and in Polish. Naturally, to establish sound correspondences between English modal adverbs and their equivalents in other languages, and for the findings to be generalisable, aligned corpora representing more languages would have to be analysed and the translations would best be investigated bi-directionally (e.g. from English into Polish and from Polish into English).[2] Further still, to see if any of the identified uses are typical of the legal context, data drawn from various legal genres would have to be confronted with data taken from a balanced reference corpus comprising various text types and communicative contexts. What can, however, be seen already at this stage of the analysis is that even though all the legal texts composing the acquis communautaire and written in the official languages of the EU Member States are regarded as “equal” and authentic, there are noticeable differences between the author visibility levels and the rhetorical force of the original English texts and that of their translated Polish equivalents.
