Il connettivo concessivo tuttavia e i suoi corrispettivi russi: un’analisi contrastiva corpus-based

Abstract

From a semantic perspective the relation of concession can be defined as a specific type of contrast between two states of affairs, i.e. counterexpectative contrast, in which the conflict originates by the denial of an assumption, generated by the first state of affair or by the context. The semantic domain of concessivity has been investigated by a fair amount of studies that have explored the variety of connectives used to express concession in an Italian-Russian contrastive perspective (Biagini/Latos 2010; Biagini 2016; Biagini/Mazzoleni 2017; 2018). In this paper we focus on the Italian adverbial connective tuttavia and its Russian most frequent counterparts, i.e. odnako, tem ne menee and vsë že. The data are taken from the Italian-Russian and Russian-Italian parallel sub-sections of the Russian National Corpus. For our research we considered contemporary original texts (from 1945 until today) and we analyzed a total of 377 examples with their translations: 87 for tuttavia, 195 for odnako, 16 for tem ne menee and 79 for vsë že. The aim of this paper is to shed light on language-specific tendencies in relation to the semantic and textual expression of concession. The present Italian-Russian contrastive analysis, that exploits both qualitative and quantitative methods, investigates three different aspects: (a) the type of coding of the relation (full coding, undercoding or inferential bridging, in terms of Prandi 2004; 2006), (b) the syntactic distribution of connectives, and (c) the combination of connectives and punctuation (cf. Ferrari/Pecorari 2018; Pecorari 2019). Although interference can play a role in translation, we observed interesting differences in the data of the two languages. The results of the multi-perspective analysis show that Russian seems to assign a major semantic and textual relevance to the concessive relation than Italian, by using a richer semantic coding and by giving it a key role in the textual architecture.