Emphatic discourse markers in medieval english literature

Abstract

The paper provides an analysis of the use of emphatic discourse markers in medieval English literature and their translations into Russian. By emphasis we mean special forcefulness of expression that gives importance to any significant element of the utterance. Accordingly, emphatic markers are linguistic units that the speaker uses to enhance the emotional expressiveness of speech. The works of the 14th century medieval English literature with a total number of 565 047 words were used as a source of data. The aim of the research is to identify emphatic discourse markers in medieval English literature, describe their diversity, frequency and functioning as well as translation methods. The paper uses some corpus methods that made it possible for us to assess the variety and frequency of emphatic lexical units. The paper considers how many of them act as emphatic discourse markers by means of contextual analysis and describes how they are translated into Russian. Due to the absence of the complete translation of the medieval works into Russian the author attempts to translate some context uses of emphatic discursive markers into Russian by herself. The research findings show that emphatic discourse markers are extremely rare in medieval English literature and their diversity is scarce. It is assumed that the frequency of emphatic discourse markers is higher in a more recent work and therefore a hypothesis is put forward about the dependence of emphatic discourse markers frequency on the diachronic component. The analysis of the examples proves that most often emphatic discourse markers occur at the beginning of the utterance, however, cases of their usage in the middle and final positions have been identified as well. The study of translations of emphatic discourse markers into Russian has shown that the range of techniques and the choice of translation equivalents are fairly diverse.