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Unique items – over- or under-represented? 179
The size of the corpus compiled in Savonlinna is now ten million words.
The frequencies of the items in focus were checked from two genres, which I
have labelled Academic and Fiction, each of which has a translated and original
sub-corpus. Each of the four sub-corpora have about one million words, and
the comparisons will be made between Original Fiction and Translated Fiction
as well as between Original Academic and Translated Academic. Since there is
every reason to believe that the genres Fiction and Academic are different in
many respects, I will treat each genre separately. This means that my Original
versus Translated comparisons will normally be done within each genre.
3. Results
The quantitative results are presented in Tables 1 and 2 below.
The verbs are presented in Table 1 in the order of frequency in Original
Fiction. Among the investigated verbs are the stylistically unmarked and
relatively frequent verbs ehtii 1 (‘has enough time’, ‘is early enough’), jaksaa (‘is
strong enough’), uskaltaa (‘has enough courage’), riittää (‘is enough’), malttaa
(‘is patient enough’), viitsii (‘has enough initiative or interest’), and other,
somewhat less frequent verbs from the semantic field of sufficiency.
The overall result of this investigation is such that it supports the Unique
Items Hypothesis very strongly especially in the Fiction part: the frequencies
are considerably lower in the Translated language corpus. Some verbs are almost
entirely confined to fictional texts and hardly appeared at all in academic
texts (e.g. viitsii, kehtaa, viihtyy). Thus the differences, if any, will not show
clearly in a corpus of this size.
In addition to frequency comparisons, it is also interesting to compare the
grammatical and collocational patterns that the verbs accumulate in Translated
versus Original language. The verbs that do appear quite frequently in Fiction
and Academic do not behave similarly in translated and original language.
There are differences in their syntactic, semantic or collocational behaviour.
For example, uskaltaa (‘has enough courage or daring’) has more instances of
impersonal usage in Original Academic than in Translated Academic. Viitsii
(‘has enough initiative or interest’) in Translated fiction is largely confined to
the idiom Älä viitsi!(‘Comeon!’).Malttaa (‘has enough patience’) has a more
varied use in Original Fiction than in Translated Fiction. In Original Fiction,
for example, the following collocations are found: malttoi mielensä (‘s/he
controlled him/herself’), malttaa olla tekemättä (‘s/he has enough control of
him/herself not to. . .’), malttaa odottaa (‘s/he is patient enough’). Translated