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Faculty of Arts and HumanitiesGeneral Linguistics (Department of Linguistics)

Impersonalization strategies in six Slavic languages

Project description

In this project I give an overview of how impersonalization is expressed in Slavic languages. In particular the project  addresses the following questions: 

  1. How is impersonalization expressed in Slavic? (by asking what types of structures six Slavic languages use to render a propositional content expressed by the pronoun man in German)
  2. Are there significant differences in the distribution of major impersonalization strategies in Slavic languages?
  3. Are there translation effects?

It presents the results of a corpus study by outlining the strategies expressing impersonalization in six Slavic spoken languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech and Polish). By using German man as a filter, this paper shows on the basis of a random sample of over 6000 translated sentences which impersonalization means Slavic languages use to express a propositional content expressed by the pronoun man in German. As the example below shows, Russian uses an infinitive construction as 'man'-equivalent:

GE            Es bedeutet, daß man auf all seine Stärke verzichtet hat. 

RU            Это значит потерять всякую силу.

EN            It means losing all strength.

CZ            To znamená pozbýt jakékoli síly.                                         (Milan Kundera)

The main findings are an outline of a cross-Slavic set of impersonalization strategies, which reveals interesting differences between the West, East and South Slavic languages in the distribution of man-equivalents and a highly significant impact of the source language on the choice of the impersonalization strategy in translation. 

Project outcome

  • Bauer, Anastasia. 2021. Impersonalization strategies in Slavic: A contrastive corpus study based on the data from six Slavic languages. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 29/2, 123-178.
  • Bauer, Anastasia. 2019. Eine Vergleichstudie slavischer man-Konstruktionen. 13. Deutscher Slavistentag, Universität Trier, 26. September
  • Bauer, Anastasia. 2018. Man-Konstruktionen in den slavischen Sprachen. XXVII. JuSla-Treffen in Heidelberg, 12.-14. September
  • Bauer, Anastasia. 2017. Wenn ‘du’ nicht du bist: eine Korpus Studie zum Gebrauch der unpersönlichen 2SG in slavischen Sprachen. XXVI. JungslavistInnen-Treffen, Bamberg, 6.-8. September