The paper examines English translation counterparts of Czech sentences containing the particles copak and jestlipak. These two particles share the expressive and intensifying postfix -pak. They are elements of the ‘third syntactical plan’ (or level) which consists of “components which place the content of the sentence in relation to the individual and his special ability to perceive, judge and assess” (Poldauf 1964: 242). The third syntactical plan is fully developed in Czech but to a much lesser degree in English. The aim of this paper is to identify and describe specific English means which correspond to these Czech particles in terms of their function. English counterparts of Czech sentences with copak/jestlipak are excerpted from the fiction component of the InterCorp parallel corpus. As opposed to the lexical means in Czech, the third syntactical plan in English is shown to rely on syntactic constructions, above all on different types of interrogative sentences. The English counterparts are used, at the same time, as markers of the functions of the Czech sentences containing copak and jestlipak, thereby further specifying the functional description of the two Czech particles. Apart from their expressivity and emotionally evaluative nature, the particles are shown to have two main functions: establishing contact and serving as means of epistemic modality.
The article presents a brief survey of English-Czech contrastive studies based on original texts and their translations from the beginnings in the mid-fifties of the last century to the present. Until the first decade of the present century, excerption was done manually, which limited the research to a small number of samples. The early studies of English largely concentrated on sentence condensation and nominal tendencies in the expression of the predicate, as compared with the verbal character of Czech. In connection with the development of the theory of functional sentence perspective other topics were found in this sphere, especially as regards word order. While the former studies can be currently pursued on the basis of InterCorp at a qualitatively higher level, research into FSP topics remains restricted to issues involving variables with formalizable realization forms. The main part of the paper focuses on some of the fallacies involved in using translation counterparts as the basis of contrastive research. One of them is the possible influence of the original; others appear in such areas as the choice of translation counterparts with respect to the issue under investigation, the assessment of their adequacy, including the possibility of misrepresentation by the translator, the validity of the translation counterpart (which is in most cases limited, as alternatives are possible) and others. In studies of functional sentence perspective a point to be considered is equivocal interpretation of the FSP structure in the original. These points are illustrated by translation counterparts in two translations of the same novel.
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