Functional Categories
1 Temporal Reference
1.3 Adverbial Ambiguity
Although time adverbials provide the best clues to help us interpret the mean-ings of aspectual constructions, they are not without their own problems.
Many of these problems, however, can be dealt with using the word- and phrase- level strategies I discussed above. For example, some time adverbs are lexically ambiguous, such as
ذنم
, which can be translated as since, for, or ago, depending on the grammatical context. Ifذنم
is followed by a phrase that describes a point in time in a construction that describes an incomplete situation, we can translate it as since, as inليللا فصتنم ذنم مئان
He has been asleep since midnight. But ifذنم
is followed by a phrase that describes a period of time, we can translate it as for, as inتاونس عبرأ ذنم انه نكسأ
I have been living here for four years. However, ifذنم
is used with a perfective verb and followed by a phrase describing a time period, we can translate as ago, as inتاونس عبرأ ذنم يفوت
He died four years ago.Time adverbials can also be structurally ambiguous, as in
تاونس ثلاث لبق ةيسائرلا تاباختنلاا نم
in (16). This adverbial phrase could mean before three years of presidential elections or three years before the presidential elections.The issue here is whether the prepositional phrase
ةيسائرلا تاباختنلاا نم
lit.from the presidential elections is a complement of the quantifier phrase
ثلاث تاونس
three years or an adjunct that only modifies it. It is our background knowledge about French presidential elections that can help us resolve this ambiguity. We know that these elections do not last for three years; there-fore, we can rule out the complement reading, and can translate the ambigu-ous phrase as three years before the presidential elections, which can be rephrased as three years ahead of the presidential elections..42692 ددعلا ،2004 ويلوي 22 ،)رصم( مارهلأا ةديرج )
16( . ةيسائرلا تاباختنلاا نم تاونس ثلاث لبق ةفورعم يزوكراس اياون تحبصأ اذكهو
Thus, Sarkozy’s intentions were known three years ahead of the presidential elections.
Other adverbial phrases are structurally complex, such as
وينوي نيب اميف 1958 سرامو 1956
in (17), which literally means in that which is between June 1956 and March 1958. This structurally complex phrase, which also involves redundancy, can be translated by leaving out the main preposi-tional phrase along with the relative pronoun, to end up with just between June 1956 and March 1958.روصع ىلع دهاشو كيرش :يعرم ديس“ ،1999 ،يداوجلا دمحم )
17( .21 ص ،ةرهاقلا ،يلوبدم ةبتكم ،”ةيلاربيللا ريزو بصنم لغشي يعرم ديس لظ 1958 سرامو 1956 وينوي نيب اميفو .يعارزلا حلاصلإل ةلودلا
Between June 1956 and March 1958, Sayyid Marei continued to hold the position of minister of agricultural reform.
The sentence in (18) poses a different kind of ambiguity; there are three adverbial phrases—
1927 ةنس يف
in 1927,1926 ةنس
in 1926, andيلاوح اماع رشع ةعبرأ
about fourteen years—as well as two perfective verbs—ىلوت
took over and
اهسسأ
founded it. It is clear that the first adverbial phrase,1927 ةنس يف
in 1927, modifies the verbىلوت
took over because it precedes the verb in the same clause. The second adverbial phrase,1926 ةنس
in 1926, modifies the verbاهسسأ
founded it in the relative clause. The problem is that it is not clear which verb is modified by the adverbial phraseرشع ةعبرأ يلاوح اماع
about fourteen years.نرقلا ءامظعو ءافرظ رداونو ريس“ ،2002 ،حاتفلا دبع قيدص ديس )
18( .277 ص ،ةرهاقلا ،بيرغ راد ،”نيرشعلا ››ناديز لآ‹‹ اهسسأ يتلا ››ةهاكفلا‹‹ ةلجم ريرحت ةسائر ىلوت 1927 ةنس يفو .اماع رشع ةعبرأ يلاوح 1926 ةنس
In 1927, he became editor-in-chief of Al- Fukaaha magazine, which was founded by the Zeidan family a year earlier, and he held this position for about fourteen years.
The phrase
اماع رشع ةعبرأ يلاوح
about fourteen years cannot modify the verbسسأ
founded in the embedded relative clause because these two ele-ments are semantically and structurally incompatible; we know that the magazine was founded in 1926, which means it is impossible that it was founded over fourteen years. This leaves only one option: This adverbial phrase modifies the verb in the main clause, but they are separated by arelative clause. This is fine in Arabic, but English does not allow this struc-ture. As a result, we need to move this adverbial phrase to the main clause in our translation. This gives us two adverbial phrases modifying the same verb: In 1927 he took over the position of editor-in-chief of Al- Fukaaha maga-zine for about fourteen years. This translation conveys the same information as the source sentence, but it sounds inconsistent. Moreover, the new site of the adverbial phrase in this candidate translation makes it difficult to include the relative clause, which cannot be separated from the noun it modifies. One way to resolve this issue is to apply phrasal reconstruction and translate the adverbial phrase as a separate clause to be conjoined with the main clause.
Just as adverbials can help us accurately interpret temporal relations, as-pectual constructions can help us resolve the translation problems related to adverbials. For instance, the first clause in (19) includes the nominative subject
اماع نوثلاث
thirty years, the perfective verbترم
passed, and the time adverbسملأاب
yesterday. Obviously, it is impossible for thirty years to pass within the twenty- four- hour period referred to byسمأ
yesterday—that is, there seems to be a conflict between the subject and the adverbial time refer-ence. The key to translating this sentence has to do with the semantics of the perfective aspect rather than the adverb. Because the verbترم
passed marks the perfective aspect rather than the past tense, it does not profile the internal structure of the event—that is, it does not describe the passing of thirty years as a durative situation, but only its termination. Therefore, we can use lexical substitution while reconstructing the sentence to avoid the contradictory phrase thirty years passed yesterday..44671 ددعلا ،2009 سرام 27 ،)رصم( مارهلأا ةديرج )
19( لازامو ،ليئارسإو رصم نيب ملاسلا ةيقافتا ىلع سملأاب ترم اماع نوثلاث .››ادراب ملاسلا‹‹
Yesterday marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Peace Accord between Egypt and Israel, but this peace is still “cold.”
The examples discussed above clearly demonstrate that Arabic and Eng-lish use different linguistic systems to encode temporal domains and rela-tions. Regardless of these differences, the aspectual system of Arabic and the tense system of English overlap quite a bit in terms of their functions, and the translation challenges we have seen come up only in particular areas where the two systems work differently. The good news is that we can always translate Arabic temporal expressions because they are based
on universal concepts, and we can still use the same translation strategies I discussed in the previous chapters to resolve these issues.
2 Negation
Negation is a semantic function that expresses denial by changing the truth values of sentences. If I say John is in his office, and he is indeed in his of-fice, then this sentence is true. When negation is applied to this sentence, we get John is not in his office, which denies its affirmative counterpart and is therefore false in this context. The reverse is also true; if an affir-mative sentence is false in a particular context, its negated counterpart is true. This logical function of negation is universal across all languages. In other words, we do not expect conceptual mismatches when translating ne-gated sentences. In fact, most of the negation- related translation problems we might encounter are syntactic in nature and result from the interaction between negation and other functional categories.
Although negation has only one semantic function, it appears in various grammatical configurations or strategies. The main such strategy is sen-tential negation, which applies to a complete sentence to deny the relation between the subject and the predicate. This type of negation is expressed in English by using not following an auxiliary verb, as in John does not work in this office. Arabic, conversely, employs various sentential negation markers, depending on the structure of the sentence and its temporal inter-pretation. For instance, the negation markers
لا
,مل
, andنل
are used in sen-tences with imperfective verbs, in whichلا
marks negation in the present,مل
expresses negation in the past, and
نل
encodes negation in the future. The negation markerام
co- occurs with both imperfective and perfective verbs re-gardless of temporal interpretations, whereasسيل
is most commonly found in nominal sentences with nonverbal predicates that describe present situa-tions. The distribution of Arabic sentential negation markers reflects a close connection between negation and temporal reference, an issue that I discuss in detail in this section.In addition to sentential negation, we need to distinguish two other ne-gation strategies: phrasal nene-gation and lexical nene-gation. Phrasal nene-gation targets only a phrase rather than a whole sentence, and it is common in el-liptical constructions, as in I am usually free, but not now and I met John but not Mary, as well as in quantified phrases, such as not every student and
for no reason. Arabic can express the same kind of negation directly using
سيل
andلا
—as inنلآا سيل
not now,لك سيل
not every, andلمأ لا
no hope—or indirectly through the expressions of exception, such asنود
other than, as inةيدان نود ىنم
Mona but not Nadia. Lexical negation, conversely, is encoded morphologically using prefixes, such as un- , non- , and dis- , among others.Because lexical negation is a constituent of a word rather than a phrase or a sentence, it does not change the truth value of the whole sentence; a sentence such as Mary is unhappy is still affirmative. Although Arabic does not typi-cally incorporate negation morphologitypi-cally, we are seeing more and more in-stances of prefixed