English and Czech Venitive Verbs in Contrast: Deictic, or not?

Abstract

This study compares the self-agentive uses of English and Czech venitive verbs, i.e., come and intransitive motion verbs prefixed by při-, in a bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Czech subtitles. Their mutual correspondence is only 45.2%, and při-verbs are translated by come more often (61.4%) than come by při-verbs (34.7%). As factors restraining the use of při-verbs we identify their strong association with the arrival perspective and the fact that the Czech venitive verbs are typically perfective. As a result, při-verbs are typically avoided in directives involving immediate imperatives as well as in permission seeking speech acts and their rejections, in comitative contexts, and in situations which call for a construal by an imperfective verb. Also mentioned is the role of functional factors, which seem less strong in Czech than in English. In the opposite direction of translation, contexts in which při-verbs tend not to be translated by come are those in which they describe motion directed at goals other than the speech participants. It is suggested that the details of the contextualization of the English venitive verb need to be revisited, mainly with respect to its narrative uses, and possibly also others, emerging in the context of changes in our understanding of space in the current world.