Японский союз shi в зеркале параллельных текстов
Japanese conjunction shi in the mirror of parallel texts

Summary/Abstract: The article addresses the meaning and use of Japanese multi-clause constructions with the conjunction shi. In the literature, the construction X shi Y is usually translated as ‘X and, moreover / and altogether Y’. Using the method of contrastive analysis of parallel texts (books about Harry Potter and their translation into Japanese), we demonstrated the nomenclature of lexical and grammatical means in the English original that served as a trigger for the use of the conjunction shi in translation. This made it possible to identify the following semantic characteristics of constructions with shi: a) combined predications belong to some homogeneous set; b) this set is open, i. e. the listener is given to understand that in addition to the named events/states of affairs, there are other similar ones; c) the second predication has more pragmatic weight; d) combined predications are presented as links in a chain of cause-and-effect relationships or in a chain of reasoning leading to a certain conclusion. From the point of view of linguistic theory, the construction is of interest in the context of the debate about the distinction between coordination and subordination. We have shown that although the construction with shi passes the main tests of syntactic coordination (both related clauses are headed by a finite predicate, the conjunction is located between the clauses, none of them can be nested within the other, it is impossible to include only one of the clauses in the scope of a question or other external operator, excluding the other), from a morphological point of view and, especially from the point of view of semantics and pragmatics, the components of the construction do not demonstrate the expected symmetry. We believe that these results indicate that in the zone of clause combining one should not consider the opposition of coordination and subordination as a privative opposition: a multifactorial approach turns out to be more fruitful.

• Details
• Contents