On the metaphorization of space: a closer look at the English far from X-construction and its Polish equivalents

Abstract

Although a fair share of scholarly attention has been paid to the metaphorically driven grammaticalization of the originally spatial English far from X-construction into a minimizer, whereby it emphatically points to the subject’s non-attainment of a given property or failure to enter a specific eventuality, little has been written about whether, and how, this change finds reflection in the translation of English texts into foreign languages, including Polish. Thus, on the basis of a random sample composed of sentences containing the English far from X-construction along with their respective Polish translations extracted from the parallel English-Polish Paralela Corpus, this paper sets out to examine how the grammaticalized English expression is typically rendered into Polish. Considering the variation observed in the data, five main translation categories have been identified, namely those involving (i) spatial markers, (ii) standard minimizers, (iii) simple negation, (iv) omission, and (v) other locutions. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that in slightly more than half of the cases, the metaphorical English construction is translated into Polish with the use of non-spatial expressions, in particular canonical minimizers, a finding which can be accounted for in terms of the fact that the Polish spatial counterparts of far from X have generally undergone a lower degree of grammaticalization.