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Untypical patterns in translations 115
Table 3. The word classes that significant collocates of degree modifiers represent
hyvin kovin oikein
CNF MuCTF MoCTF CNF MuCTF MoCTF CNF MuCTF MoCTF
adjectives 4 12 17 1 5 4 1 2 2
adverbs 3 11 3 1 4 5 1 1 2
quantifiers 2 2 1 2 3 2 – 1 1
adposition – – – – 1 – – – –
phrases
total 9 25 21 4 13 11 2 4 5
much larger in MoCTF than in CNF or MuCTF, and the proportion of
adverbial collocates, in turn, is clearly smaller (in bold numbers in Table 3).
It seems then that the source language can affect the lexical combinations,
but the tendency for untypical lexical patterning is not consistent, because the
untypicality is apparent only in the case of hyvin.Finally,thedegreemodifiers
are dissimilar in terms of the number of significant collocates they get. This
fact is less important in the context of untypical patterning in translations, but
is especially important in the context of synonymy studies. It can be added,
however, that the translation process does not seem to affect to the mutual
ability of modifiers to obtain significant collocates.
The concrete collocates of hyvin, kovin and oikein in three subcorpora are
shown in Tables 4, 5 and 6, respectively. The more comprehensive analysis of
collocational combinations would require looking at the complete list of significant
collocates; here I focus only on the 10 most significant collocates in
each subcorpus. Each table gives the collocations and their approximate English
equivalents. The collocates are sorted according to the two-significancetest-procedure
described earlier (the most significant collocate is uppermost).
A striking difference can immediately be noticed between collocates in
non-translations and translations in general: none of the collocates in the
list of MuCTF occur in the list of significant collocates of CNF. The most
significant collocation in CNF is hyvin väsynyt, whereasinMuCTFitishyvin
tärkeä. Other adjectival collocates in non-translations are vanha, kaunis and
pieni;inMuCTFtheyareerikoinen, yksinkertainen, vaikea, andvaarallinen. In
both lists, there are also adverbs, but they are different. In contrast to MuCTF,
in CNF there are quantifiers, like vähän and paljon. In the second phase
of comparison we can also find results that support the difference between
translations and non-translations. The translations from English tend to have
dissimilar collocations compared to non-translations; interestingly though, the