Should and ought to and their Translations into Czech

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F46747885%3A24510%2F16%3A00003632" target="_blank" >RIV/46747885:24510/16:00003632 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Should and ought to and their Translations into Czech

Original language description

Although much has been written about modality in the Czech language and even much more about this in English., when translating from English to Czech and vice versa, one often hesitates when it comes to deciding what the most appropriate expression to be used is. This paper presents part of an extensive study focused on the semantic field of necessity in English and Czech, mainly from the viewpoint of the differences in the general structure and the distribution of the individual means in both the languages. It focuses on two means used to express weak necessity, i.e. should and ought to. The term “necessity” in this paper refers to both deontic and epistemic interpretations. The issue has been studied using a manually excerpted corpus from contemporary British fiction and its published translations into Czech, and contemporary Czech fiction and its published translations into English. The discussion starts with the theoretical delimitation of the nuances within the meaning of necessity. Based on the theoretical criteria established, the excerpted material is categorised, analysed and discussed. The results suggest that when the two means are compared there might be a difference, although not considerable, in ought to being less subjective, expressing something not under the direct control of the speaker and therefore ought to tends to be more “hesitant”. As regards the translations into Czech, the most frequent means was the modal verb mít. However in the area of epistemic modality also muset appeared, a means expressing not weakened but strong necessity, which could be caused by the fact that muset is the only modal verb which can clearly express epistemic necessity in Czech.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

AI - Linguistics

OECD FORD branch

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Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2016

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

ELT Revisited: Some Theoretical and Practical Perspectives

ISBN

978-1-4438-9527-9

Number of pages of the result

22

Pages from-to

""

Number of pages of the book

183

Publisher name

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Place of publication

Cambridge

UT code for WoS chapter

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