CROATIAN PREPOSITION MANUPORT AND ITS POLISH TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS

Abstract

The article aims to examine the Polish equivalents of the Croatian preposition nasuprot. The method used is a part of the contextual linguistics framework, and the study was conducted on a closed parallel corpus of Croatian literary works and their Polish translations. The study consisted of two stages. In the first stage the output unit was characterised because of lexicographic and grammatical sources, after which the obtained information was compared with the data obtained during corpus analysis. In this study, we obtained information on the numerical superiority of the spatial senses of the preposition nasuprot over the non-spatial ones. The first group was dominated by the importance of location over the significance of the targeted traffic. Within the group of non-spatial meanings, we have identified the following senses: the addressee’s meanings, the consent and the differentiating comparison. The second stage of the study focused on the analysis of equivalence, which consisted of establishing the Polish equivalents for the abovementioned semantic groups. Secondary prepositions or strings with prepositional function were the most frequent equivalents. More distant translations concerned non-real relations and used other means of conveying particular meanings, e.g. adjective, verb, phraseme. In the group of locational meanings, the basic equivalent could be chosen: the preposition naprzeciw and its variant naprzeciwko. The study of the equivalence in this group also revealed the closeness of the preposition nasuprot, which in some contexts appeared in the form of its Polish equivalents: koło (near), obok (beside), przy (at). In the group of unparalleled accounts, due to the small number of instances, it was impossible to determine the basic equivalents for particular meanings. The study has revealed the existence of multiple means for expressing individual relations.