A Coserian Outlook on Textual Meaning – With Some Observations Regarding the Process of Translation
Emma Tamaianu-Morita
Ofelia Ichim et.al. (eds.), Past and Current Challenges in the Evolution of the Romanian Language, Literature and Culture, Timișoara: Editura Universității de Vest 581 - 596 2022年12月
[査読有り] The paper focuses on Eugenio Coseriu’s outlook on the nature of textual meaning (sense), and aims at highlighting the specificity and originality of this theoretical view in the historical moment when it emerged on the international scene of linguistics, in the latter half of the 20th century, as well as its topicality in the context of contemporary trends in the disciplines of discourse / textuality.
We begin by discussing a series of fundamental tenets of Integral Text Linguistics, or “text linguistics as a hermeneutics of sense”, envisaged by Coseriu as a linguistics of Level III (individual), coherently interconnected with the linguistics of Levels II and I (historical and universal) in his triadic model of speaking as a cultural activity: the “double semiotic relation” in discourse, the relation between text-constitutive units and strategies (elements of textual expression) and units of sense, the issue of the objectivity of textual sense.
We then proceed to demonstrate that a privileged methodological path for attesting the objectivity of textual sense in genuine texts is the process of translation, and especially the comparative analysis of different translated versions, in multiple languages, of the text in question. This approach is based on the fact that Coseriu views translation as a peculiar technique of speech, a ‘speaking raised to the power of two’, in which the expressive means of another language are harnessed in order to re-constitute a textual meaning that is already given, with all the details of its articulation, in the original text.
Using Dylan Thomas’ famous poem Do not go gentle into that good night, we illustrate how the units and procedures of textual constitution are articulated in a genuine text to the effect of triggering the process of sense construction / interpretation. If we treat the text as an integral whole and follow the sense-construction process up to the maximal identifiable limit of all its constitutive relations, it becomes objectively necessary to connect Thomas’ poem to several Shakespearean plays. Contrastive analyses with the poem’s translated versions into Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian serve to substantiate the tenet that, within the hermeneutic approach of integral text linguistics, translation can provide benchmarks for ascertaining the vectors that guide the construction of sense in genuine texts.