Y90 - Miscellaneous Categories: OtherReturn

This article deals with the issues of translating -ingly adverbs functioning as content disjuncts. It does so on the example of the two most frequently used -ing participle based disjuncts surprisingly and seemingly. A judgement-value content disjunct surprisingly expresses the speaker's attitude to what is being said as unexpected whereas seemingly, a truth-value epistemic content disjunct expresses the speaker's degree of doubt. Although their disjunctive function prevails, they are homonymous with other, integrated manner or intensifying syntactic functions. Therefore, a careful analysis of their syntactic position in the sentence and their semantic interpretation are important to determine their non-integrated character and disjunctive function. Their translation into Czech seems to be problematic as -ingly disjuncts as their corresponding adverbial structural counterparts are more or less non-existent. Existing adverbial counterparts usually reflect the integrated nature of the adverbial and not its sentence modifying function. Czech thus makes use of particles and clausal realisations. This article focuses on the appropriateness of different types of translation comparing English and Czech versions of two content disjuncts: surprisingly and seemingly.