Use of translation as a research method in contrastive cognitive poetics: Word formation in Jabberwocky and its Ukrainian translations
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the last decade or so, Cognitive Poetics has received increasing scholarly interest as a self-standing subfield in cognitive scientific research (Brône 2009; Gavins and Steen 2003; Semino and Culpeper 2002; Stockwell 2002; Tsur 2008). In this field, research along the cross-linguistic dimension has started to gather momentum, but so far limited attention has been given to constructional approaches (e.g. Boas ed. 2010). In view of the existing gap, we propose to examine the form-meaning pairings in a poetic text and its translations. The poem we choose is Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, its Ukrainian translations by M. Lukash and V. Korniyenko and by V. Narizhna and its Czech translations by J. Císař and A. and H. Skoumals, and we focus on only the first stanza. In the current paper, we in particular look at compounding and lexical blending (Kemmer 2003; Renner et.al ed. 2012 and the references therein), a morphological strategy of abridging and combining various lexical roots to form a new word, for the highly distinctive stylistic flavor that blending adds to the entire poem. We will compare selected pieces from the original and from its various translations to investigate how lexical blending is used to create stylistic effects across languages. |