Coming to Grips with Rather Elusive Adverbs: On English 'rather' and French 'plutôt'

Abstract

This parallel corpus study looks into the contrastive connective and degree modifier uses of two cognate adverbs that can be considered each other’s crosslinguistic counterparts, English rather and French plutôt. These adverbs have very similar functional profiles, both being able to act as compromisers and to express the same range of contrastive relationships—reformulation, preference, replacement and antithesis. This study confirms earlier findings regarding the predominance of the contrastive uses over the degree uses and the overall trend for the contrastive markers to mostly be translated by each other. In addition, however, this study has shown that despite the adverbs’ cross-linguistic similarity, translators often opt for alternative renderings of these adverbs rather than their immediate corresponding forms in the target language. Whereas omission is sometimes opted for, especially for the contrastive uses and for degree rather, explicitation could often be observed.