Translating deictic motion verbs among Bulgarian, Croatian and Serbian: a corpus-based study

Abstract

This article deals with translating South Slavic deictic verbs. Specifically, we consider translations among Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian. Deictic verbs are verbs whose interpretation is dependent on the location of speech-act participants (Fillmore 1997), such as come and go. In research on Slavic, certain motion verbs’ prefixes have been discussed as “deictic prefixes” (see Grenoble 1991, Filipović 2009, Łozińska 2018). Particular emphasis in this analysis is on the prefixed motion verbs dojda/doći, idvam/dolaziti, otida/otići, and otivam/odlaziti found in Bulgarian, Croatian, and Serbian literary texts and their translations. We present a brief quantitative overview and conduct a qualitative study of deixis-related meanings, paying necessary attention to other non-deictic meanings. Special attention is given to the constructional interplay of various deictic elements that co-occur with deictic verbs. Since we deal with literary texts and not everyday interaction, we consider the genre and context and apply the notion of viewpoint, which also covers the mental viewpoint adopted by the narrator, in addition to the “deictic” viewpoint of one of the speech participants. In the study, we observed shifts in point-of-view from deictic to non-deictic construal and vice versa, and from dynamic to static construal. These phenomena relate to the fact that in a text with a third person narrator, there is no innate deictic centre, while in casual conversation, the interlocutors create the deictic centre. The results show a preference for using come when motion towards a protagonist is described in a neutral context.