Prolegomena to the parameterization of contextual and dictionary equivalents in Polish-Russian bitext: the dimension of lacunarity (exemplified with a fantasy genre work)

Abstract

The article deals with lacunarity within the research of Polish-Russian bitext (BTXT) and directing this research to the field of self-learning systems. It defines the phenomenon of lacunarity and presents the types of BTXT lacunas. The analysis was conducted on 30 BTXT of type {sentence X L1||sentence X L2} retrieved from Andrzej Sapkowski’s novel Warriors of God and its Russian translation by Yevgeny Vaysbrot. The fundamental parameter of the analysis is the asymmetry between L1 and L2 within the criterial features: type of connotation, belonging to the functional style, phraseme/ non-phraseme, hapax, summary/asummary meaning, distribution of components, metaphoricity/non-metaphoricity, lexical meaning of components, belonging to the class of paroemia. Lacunarity is understood as the absence of a particular feature or the sum of features in sentence X of L2 toward sentence X in L1. Such lacunarity is identified with asymmetry. The parameterization results of lacunarity-based asymmetry show that parameterization and BTXT tagging can have modular properties, which, in turn, can serve to train a neural network for a deeper (automatic, non-manual) analysis of more parallel texts. The study focused most attention on phrasemes (FR) – collocations and idioms.