Syntactic markedness as a cultural transmitter: The Swedish translation of Witold Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk

Journal Title Here,2022, 1–15 doi: DOI HERE Advance Access Publication Date: Day Month Year Paper Syntactic markedness as a cultural transmitter: The Swedish translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk Silvie Cinková 1,∗and Ewa Data-Bukowska 2 1Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University – Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Ke Karlovu 3, Praha 2, 121 16, Czechia and 2Institute of German and Nordic Studies, Jagiellonian University – Faculty of Philology, Gołębia 24, Kraków, 31-007, Poland ∗Corresponding author. cink[email protected] FOR PUBLISHER ONLY Received on Date Month Year; revised on Date Month Year; accepted on Date Month Year Abstract Witold Gombrowicz, a world-famous Polish existentialist writer, is known for his stylistic eccentricity. The central theme of his work was the discrepancy between the modern individual and the national identity. In his 1953 novel Trans-Atlantyk, this tension is reflected not only in the content but also in the form of expression, which deconstructs a distinctive 17th-century Polish storytelling style – a style that for modern Poles remains familiar and laden with patriotic connotations. Translating such a text poses a formidable challenge. This study examines the potential pitfalls of this challenge from the syntactic perspective, applying the concept of structural markedness to a case study of the Swedish translation of Trans-Atlantyk – regarded as one of its most successful renditions in another language. A quantitative comparison of the distributions of selected syntactic structures in the novel and in a reference corpus reveals extreme syntactic markedness in both the original Polish and the Swedish version. Our analysis shows that the Swedish translation preserves and even amplifies key features of Gombrowicz’s marked style – especially the fronting of infinitive clauses. This confirms that syntactic markedness plays a central role in the novel’s rhetoric and is effectively rendered in Bodegård’s translation. Key words: syntactic markedness, corpus linguistics, stylometry, Polish literature, translation, Swedish word order 1. Introduction Witold Gombrowicz’ renowned novel Trans-Atlantyk poses a translation challenge due to its highly stylized language. Earlier studies have suggested that, at least on the syntactic level, the hallmark of Gombrowicz’ quirky style is syntactically overloaded sentence-initial positions. In this study, we provide a quantitative assessment of this phenomenon in the Polish original and in the Swedish translation. We illustrate how Gombrowicz’s stylistic manipulation of word order falls outside the normative syntactic conventions of either Polish or Swedish written discourse. Interestingly, the Swedish translation turns out to be even more extreme than the Polish original, and yet it was widely celebrated as very readable. This attests to the unexpected syntactic elasticity of this fixed-word-order language and the translator’s mastery alike. The Polish novelist, philosopher, and playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) garnered international acclaim and significantly influenced both European and Argentinian existentialist literature © The Author 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.p[email protected] 1 2Silvie Cinková and Ewa Data-Bukowska (Basiuk, 2013; Dapıa, 2019; Misurella, 1987; Nycz and Kobyłecka-Piwońska, 2024; Ross, 1971; KobyłeckaPiwońska and Piglia, 2015; Stasiakiewicz, 2015). His most translated works are the novels Ferdydurke (1937), Trans-Atlantyk (1953), Pornography (1960), and Cosmos (1965), the dramas Ivona, Princess of Burgundia (1938), and The Marriage (1948/1953)1, as well as his Diaries (1957-1966) and Kronos (published posthumously, 2013). Within Polish literature, Gombrowicz occupies a central place within the canon of domestic modernism and – alongside Witkacy and Bruno Schulz – is considered one of the most brilliant figures of modern Polish writing (e.g., Bolecki, 2014). At the same time, Gombrowicz is often described as ’a forerunner of postmodern literature’ (Basiuk, 2013, p. 218), , due to his tendency to reflect on the sign-based nature of reality (“sign-reflexivity”), resulting in bold experiments on the level of literary representation (Basiuk, 2013, p. 221). Ryszard Nycz discusses Gombrowicz’s semiotic experimentation in connection with silvae rerum2 – originally private chronicles maintained by Polish noble families over generations, wherein accounts of family events intermingled with local politics and excerpts of interesting reads. Nycz describes this tradition as a “‘bio-graphy’ of structure” characterized “not so much by an effort of representation, but rather by an attempt to present a critical experience of language, to stage its possibilities, and finally to present itself as a text, exposing its sign-like, material presence” (Nycz, 1996, p. 102). Pawel Wojtas elaborates on Nycz’s notion of ’sylvicity’ in Gombrowicz’s writing, describing it as ’the linguistic-ontological misalliance of the text as an exemplification of the deconstruction of metaphysics that kept poststructuralist and postmodernist philosophers busy; it also dramatizes Gombrowicz’s self-reflexive writing and language’ Wojtas (2014). Indeed, some contemporary scholars (Jaszewska, 2002; Markowski, 2004) associate Gombrowicz’s writing with post-modernism rather than modernism (both of which are well-established categories in Polish literary history). Gombrowicz’s prevailing theme is the individual existential struggle with nationality, conceived as a burden of rigid norms tied to social classes and 1First published in a Spanish translation in 1948. 2Originally, a sylva (Latin: silva rerum) was a form of writing derived, among other things, from the collection Silvae by the Roman poet Stacius. religiosity, imposed by a homogeneous community (Boyers, 1970; Gömöri, 1978). It emerges in his national debut Ferdydurke and continues to unfold through his years of Argentinian (1939-1963) and French (1963-1969) exile, but it is most prominent in the novel Trans-Atlantyk. Unplanned exile enriched Gombrowicz’s reflections on national identity, shaped by his encounters with the Polish diaspora, the Argentinian intellectual milieu, as well as the cosmopolitan and universalist tendencies of 1960s’ existentialism, with its epicentre in Paris. In his works, Gombrowicz projected the conflict between belonging and alienation into his writing style, seasoning his rhetorical vehemence with a humorous eye-wink. He masterfully exploited different stylistic registers to emphasize this conflict. His favourite technique was distorting and twisting connotationheavy historical Polish writing styles beyond parody. The stylistic dimension of his writings, along with his extensive international reception, makes Gombrowicz an intriguing subject not only for literary analysis but also for translation studies. Existing scholarship on translations of Gombrowicz’s texts reveals a remarkable diversity of target languages and perspectives (Dapıa, 2019; DataBukowska and de Bończa Bukowski, 2022; Holmgren, 1988; Jarzębski, 2012; Kobyłecka-Piwońska and Piglia, 2015; Konieczna-Twardzikowa and Filipowicz-Rudek, 2006; Kühl, 1995; Laurent, 2005; Masłowska, 2022; Skibińska, 2004; Spólna, 2022; Strohanova, 2018; Szwebs, 2014). Considered to rank among his most challenging texts in this regard are the novels Ferdydurke and Trans-Atlantyk, and it is in TransAtlantyk where the Gombrowiczian style-twisting culminates. In this study, therefore, we turn our attention to Trans-Atlantyk to contribute a comparative corpuslinguistic perspective to this debate. We focus on the Swedish translation by Anders Bodegård (Gombrowicz, 2009), which has been highly praised by both Swedish readers and Polish literary scholars (Data-Bukowska and de Bończa Bukowski, 2018; DataBukowska, 2023; Data-Bukowska and de Bończa Bukowski, 2022). Bodegård intuitively mimicked one prominent feature of the original idiolect, namely a heavy syntactic overloading in sentence-initial position (to the left of the main sentence predicate). Our study quantitatively examines the effect of overloaded sentence initials on the stylistic markedness of both the Polish original and the Swedish translation. Short Article Title 3 2. Stylization and intertextuality in Trans-Atlantyk Gombrowicz wrote Trans-Atlantyk in 1953, having spent fourteen years in Argentina. By that time, he had already become well integrated into exile in Argentinian intellectual circles as well as into the Polish émigré community there. Trans-Atlantyk is, on the one hand, a fictitious counterpart to his Diaries, and, on the other, a revisitation of Ferdydurke – this time with a protagonist who has come of age and grown confident about his own maturity, yet is still struggling with the conventions of the diverse communities in which he finds himself. He lives a life torn between different loyalties, one of which is to his own personal and artistic integrity. The narrator and protagonist of Trans-Atlantyk is a young writer named Witold Gombrowicz, who arrives in Buenos Aires on a Polish tourist cruise in the summer of 1939 and, on learning about the outbreak of war, takes a spontaneous decision to stay in Argentina. The reality he finds there, rich in grotesquely exaggerated realities of Polish émigré life, generates a chain of comical and absurd events. However, the author himself elevates his linguistic eccentricities (which he refers to in Polish as harce “antics”) to the status of a secondary protagonist, describing the language of the novel as “disjointed, sclerotic, baroque, absurd, in the 17th century storytelling style” (Gombrowicz, 1996, p. 88). Indeed, Trans-Atlantyk’s quirky language draws on the so-called Sarmatian style, a signature style of Polish baroque literature. This baroque Polish idiom remains familiar to and even cherished by speakers of modern Polish, not least thanks to its historicizing reuse in the great national epopees by Adam Mickiewicz (Sir Thaddeus, 1834) and the historical novels by the Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz (With Fire and Sword 1884, The Deluge 1886, and Sir Michael 1887). The main linguistic feature of the Sarmatian style is ornamentality in both vocabulary and syntax. This is accompanied by characteristic topoi, such as a strong hierarchy of values, with God, homeland, and honor at the top, an excessive emphasis on official titles and ranks, and an unshakable belief in the superiority of the Sarmatian identity over the rest of the world (Dąbrowska, 2004, p. 190; Wilkoń, 2002, p. 110f). However, the Sarmatian style was not exclusively associated with solemn themes; it was also used in humorous writings. A notable entertaining genre of the 17th century was gawęda szlachecka (noble story-telling). This literary form features a narrator assuming the persona of a Polish nobleman giving a bombastic account of his life, as if in a spontaneous speech. The events emerge in a loose sequence, with no overarching point or plot (see Nycz, 1996), merely serving as a proud demonstration of the narrator’s prominence in a system framed by the Sarmatian traditions, high-ranking offices, and the authority of God’s (Catholic) church, all deliberately augmented for a grotesque effect. The most famous gawęda is Memoirs by Jan Chryzostom Pasek (approx. 1636–1701). With an irresistible bravado, the retired soldier Pasek recounts grisly clashes with Swedes and Muscovites on Lithuanian and Ruthenian battlefields, daring sea expeditions and hunts, all this embellished with abundant name dropping. Later Pasek also takes his audience through the ordeals of the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and his own less-than-ideal marriage with a wealthy widow. Pasek has been adored not only by scholars of Polish literature but also by the broader Polish public. His idiolect has inspired Polish authors ever since. For instance, Henryk Rzewuski’s humorous Memoirs of Soplica (1839-45) is a direct reference to Pasek; but even Mickiewicz and Sienkiewicz invoked it to enliven direct speech in their otherwise solemn historical frescoes. Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk thus forges intertextual links to a long-standing tradition of Polishness, in both content and form (gawęda), yet with a clearly subversive intent: while challenging the Polish patriotic traditionalism from an existentialist, cosmopolitan, South American, and “transatlantic” perspective, it also linguistically deconstructs the gawęda as the incorporation of that traditionalism. It is this defamiliarization of a classic historical style, pushed beyond alienation, that at the same time represents the story’s “most important organizing principle” and “central theme”3(Sławkowa, 1981, p. 31f). In her highly praised monograph dedicated to the narrative style of Trans-Atlantyk, Sławkowa identifies individual elements that strike the reader, scrutinizing them on the phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic levels from a diachronic perspective. She cross-references these features with existing linguistichistorical works, considering their systematic as well as pragmatic aspects (la langue and la parole in the 3Cf. Gombrowicz in his own words: “What to choose? Loyalty to the past ... or freedom of free creation?” (Gombrowicz, 1996, p. 93). 4Silvie Cinková and Ewa Data-Bukowska Saussurean tradition) (1981, p. 34f). Among these features, the most systematically recurring turns out to be the shifting of the predicate to the last position in the clause (1981, pp. 58, 63). Predicate shifts were certainly used in the Sarmatian style but were neither as frequent nor as radical as in Gombrowicz’s rendering. Sławkowa concludes that the style is decidedly untypical4(zdecydowanie nietypowy, 1981, p. 62) and cannot be associated with any particular period of time (1981, p. 15) despite its clear intertextual references to the Old Polish cultural structure (staropolska struktura kulturowa, 1981, p. 14). All in all, the style is extremely marked in the Jakobsonian sense (Jakobson, 1972), and indeed doubly so: not only in relation to modern Polish norms, but also in relation to the (modern reception of) baroque Polish. 3. Trans-Atlantyk as a translation challenge Literary translation often stretches far beyond the quest for adequacy in content and style; rather, it seeks to transmit cultural concepts across communities separated by languages and cultures. The linguistic as well as the cultural distance vary, each posing a different sort of challenge for the translator. Trans-Atlantyk was written for and about Poles, by a Pole struggling with his Polishness, based on the unique Polish course of history and literary tradition. The author himself considered Trans-Atlantyk the least known of his works, attributing this to “its linguistic eccentricities” that he described as “difficult to translate” (Gombrowicz, 1994, p. 85). Without a doubt, its plot is deeply culture-specific. At the same time, the conflict between belonging and authenticity, which it explores, is nevertheless a universal theme. Translators often face a strategic choice between the options of domestication or foreignization of source concepts (Grimstad, 2021, p. 292), based on whether similar concepts exist in the target community. TransAtlantyk, in particular, challenges the translator to strike a successful balance between domestication and foreignization, not only regarding the concepts presented in the content, but also those presented by the linguistic stylization. Numerous studies have discussed stylistic issues in various translations of Trans-Atlantyk into diverse target languages (see e.g., Dapıa, 2019; DataBukowska, 2019, 2023; Grimstad, 2021; Jarniewicz 4Unless stated otherwise, translations of quotations into English are our own. and Skibińska, 2004; Szulim, 2014; Szwebs, 2014; Tokarz, 2003; Tomaszewski, 2004; Data-Bukowska and de Bończa Bukowski, 2022; Wojtas, 2014, pp. 4244, 128-137), but they barely mention the syntactic markedness in the original noted by Sławkowa (1981). One exception is Claudio Salmeri’s doctoral thesis Trans-Atlantyk Witolda Gombrowicza w angielskim i włoskim przekładzie (Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz in English and Italian Translation, 2012), which analyses examples of syntactic markedness in the target languages alongside phonetic, morphological, lexical and phraseological archaizations (although the analysis is generally limited to a subjective evaluation of the translation quality). Data-Bukowska and de Bończa Bukowski (2018) studied syntactic patterns in the Swedish translation and praised its adequate approach to TransAtlantyk’s syntactic ingenuity. However, their work was mostly qualitative. Our current study elaborates on their initial observations with a data-driven quantitative assessment of the differences between the Swedish translation and different registers of the contemporary Swedish language, compared to the differences between the Polish original and different registers of contemporary Polish – in each case based on a reference corpus. 4. Transmission of cultural concepts in the Swedish translation Trans-Atlantyk was translated into Swedish by Anders Bodegård (Gombrowicz, 2009), a renowned Swedish philologist and translator, who also translated Gombrowicz’s Diaries (Dagboken, 1990–1993) and the drama The Marriage (Vigseln, 1995), with great success. Critical commentaries on the translation reflected on the stylistic complexity of Trans-Atlantyk: “The enormous difficulty makes it understandable that we have had to wait almost sixty years for a Swedish translation” (Strömberg, 2009). They appreciated that Bodegård’s translation remained readable, despite the original being “a giddy language monster with boisterous gestures, a bewildering number of capital letters and all the clauses out of order”. Bodegård’s translation was praised for being “midway between normalizing and self-violent – in other words, just right” (Kastner, 2009). At this point it will be useful to draw comparisons with translations into other two Germanic languages, English and Norwegian, which we see as representing Short Article Title 5 opposite extremes on the domestication–foreignization spectrum (cf. Grimstad, 2021). Like the Swedish translation, the Norwegian translation by A. Banach (Gombrowicz, 2015) was also very well received. In contrast to Bodegård, however, she resolved the stylistic challenge through consistent cultural domestication: she adopted the style of (the father and son pair) Nicolai and Henrik Wergeland, prominent representatives of Norwegian romantic nationalism (1840–1867). Both Poland and Norway share the historical experience of foreign domination and cultural marginalization, involving a lack of respect (or outright oppression) from others. The resulting resentment led to a form of a patriotic collectivism, in which expressions of individual authenticity could easily be perceived as acts of betrayal. Hence, the stylistic allusion on the period of Norwegian national emancipation resonated well with Norwegian readers (Grimstad, 2021). The English translation by French and Karsov (Gombrowicz, 1994) presents quite the opposite example5. As English has been a language of dominant world powers and a global lingua franca, it lacks a stylistic expression of defensive nationalism. Therefore, French and Karsov opted for a general strategy of exoticization (for analysis, see Szwebs, 2014, p. 138). They rendered Gombrowicz’s eccentricity through a combination of allusions to T. S. Eliot, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne, as well as an eclectic archaization of vocabulary and inflection stretching across different periods and with a remarkable overuse of inverse word order (Szwebs, 2014, pp. 139-141). While the translators identified and faithfully mimicked Gombrowicz’s language distortion strategies6, the readers did not appreciate this stylistic parody and found the translation to be overall misguided (Szwebs, 2014, p. 143). Bodegård’s translation is somewhere in the middle on the domestication – foreignization/exoticization scale. It sports an eccentric idiolect that makes a 5There also exists a more recent English translation by Danuta Borchardt (Gombrowicz, 2014), which is not further analyzed here. 6This is illustrated by the following excerpt: “[...] Having reached this edifice, I stopped there, and methinks go or not go as why should I go to the Bishop if from the Faith I am a backslider, a heretic, a blasphemer. And presently a most terrible Vainglory, a Pride of mine that from my childhood has directed me against this Church of mine!” (Gombrowicz, 1994, p.10, after Szwebs, 2014, p. 141) vaguely archaic impression without explicitly referring to a concrete period. At the same time, the archaization is very subtle: explicitly archaic words occur only rarely, and the syntactic stylization is evident, yet it never violates the modern Swedish grammar. On the one hand, Bodegård manages to preserve the overwhelming stylistic effect of the original; on the other hand, he avoids making a direct grammatical reference to the national past. Swedish literary history knows no equivalent to the Polish gawęda in terms of its communicative function; that is, a genre that is both pompous and chatty. Hence, Bodegård adopted a mixture of grandiosity and spokenness and made his narrator a chatterbox who seeks to impress his audience with refined speech above his social rank, ultimately bending the style towards parody. 5. Syntactic markedness in the Swedish translation The most striking feature of the Polish Sarmatian stylization is that it frequently places the finite verb at the end of the clause (Sławkowa, 1981, pp. 58, 63). In their earlier analysis of Bodegård’s Swedish translation, Data-Bukowska and de Bończa Bukowski 2018 qualitatively determined prominent syntactic patterns, and they noticed a recurrent syntactic overload of the sentence-initial position (that is, the main finite verb being preceded by unusually many words), a feature that it shared with the Polish original, although the translation did not distribute it in quite the same sentences. This is illustrated in Examples 1-3 (for each example, we first provide the original Polish, then a literal gloss in English, followed by Bodegård’s Swedish version, also with a literal gloss in English). Example 1 Polish:Dwudziestego pierwszego sierpnia 1939 roku ja na statku „Chrobry” do Buenos Aires przybijałem. (Twenty-first August 1939 I on the ship “Chrobry” to Buenos Aires arrived.) Swedish:Den tjugoförsta augusti året 1939 landade jag med fartyget Bolesław den Tappre i Buenos Aires. (The 21 August the year 1939 landed I with the ship Bolesław den Tappre in Buenos Aires.) 6Silvie Cinková and Ewa Data-Bukowska Example 2 Polish:Sam zostawszy (bo Ciecisz dawno już był zemknął) w cichości, która nastąpiła po rozgłośnem nadejściu naszem, naokoło z ciekawością się rozglądnąłem. (Alone staying (because Ciecisz had long since disappeared) in the quiet that followed our loud arrival, around curiously I looked.) Swedish:Ensam kvar där (Ciecisz hade smugit iväg för länge sedan), i tystheten som avlöst vår larmande ankomst, såg jag mig nyfiket omkring. (Alone left there (Ciecisz had long since slipped away), in the silence that followed our noisy arrival, looked I around curiously.) Example 3 Polish:Owóż człowiek ten, Metys chyba, Portugalczyk, z perskiej tureckiej matki w Libii urodzony, Gonzalem zwał się; a bardzo Bogaty, około 11-tej lub 12-tej z rana z łóżka wstaje i kawę wypija, a potem na ulicę wychodzi i tam po niej chodzi, a za Chłopcami albo Chłopakami. (Well, this man, a Mestis presumably, a Portuguese, from a Persian Turkish mother in Libya born, Gonzal was called: and very Rich, about 11 or 12 o’clock in the morning he out of bed raises and coffee drinks, and then out into the street and walks there along it, and after Boys or Guys.) Swedish:Denne man minsann, Mestis antagligen, Portugis av persisk turkisk moder född i Libyen, vid namn Gonzalo; och mycket Rik, cirka klockan 11 eller klockan 12 stiger han ur sängen och dricker kaffe, och sedan går han ut på gatan och där går han gatan fram, och efter Pojkar eller Småpojkar går han (This man, Mestis probably, Portuguese of Persian Turkish mother born in Libya, by name Gonzalo; and very rich, about 11 or 12 o’clock gets he out of bed and drinks coffee, and then goes he out into the street and there walks the street down, and after the Boys or Little Boys he goes.) This was an intriguing observation, given that the syntactic overload of the sentence-initial position is very marked even in a free-word-order language like Polish. In a verb-second language like Swedish, the markedness is presumably even more extreme. To assess just how marked the syntactic overload of the sentence initial position is for Swedish, we need a way to compare against a bulk of presumably unmarked sentences. In Swedish grammar, the declarative sentence is conceived as a sequence of slots (see Table 1), with the second slot always occupied by the finite verb. The first slot (sentence-initial element) can be populated by any clause element. The most unmarked option is for the subject to come in this first slot, but if it does not, then the subject occupies the slot immediately following the finite verb (resulting in what is known as inverse word order). The clause elements in the sentence-initial position can be words or constructions ranging from prepositional phrases to finite subordinate clauses. The length of the sentence-initial element is an important stylistic feature: long sentence-initial elements are typical of formal texts, whereas spoken language tends to favour shorter ones (Lagerholm, 2016, p. 131f). According to Lagerholm’s report on related research, the sentence-initial element takes (on average) approximately 1.4 – 1.9 words in spontaneous speech, 2.8 in newspapers, 3.4 in academic prose, and 6 in legal prose (Lagerholm, 2016, p. 250), but with a high dispersion, especially in formal texts. How is it, then, that both the Polish and Swedish text exhibit syntactic overload in the sentence-initial position, and readers perceive this word order in both languages as marked yet acceptable? We speculate that it is the syntactic overload of sentence-initial elements that lends the narration its vehemence. Its markedness is considerable, given that such structures rarely occur in the colloquial register. Undeniably, the narrator pushes himself into a formal style; and yet even with all its eccentricity, the narration is still recognizable as spontaneous speech. In this respect, fronting serves as a powerful pragmatic device for spontaneous speech: When fronting a piece of information, a speaker deliberately contrasts it with what he or she assumes to be the recipient’s expectations7. 7Presenting a piece of information as contradictory to expectations is a way to highlight it. As Givón puts it: “The less predictable the information is or the more important, the more likely it is to be placed earlier in the clause.” Extending its length, as we observe in both language versions of Trans-Atlantyk, adds even more emphasis: “the less predictable the information is, or the more important, the more prominent, distinct or large will be the code element(s) that convey it” (Givón, 1984, p. 249f). Short Article Title 7 Table 1. Structure of the Swedish declarative sentence. Sentence-initial element Finite verb Subject Adverbial Infinite verb Complement Adverbial At the same time, this causes the main predicate to drift towards the end of the sentence. In unmarked sentences, the end is populated with circumstances that are new to the recipient (focus). Yet the main predicate in a postponed position spotlights the entire event, presenting each and every piece of information as new, striking, and extraordinary at the same time. And this is how Gombrowicz (and Bodegård likewise) claim the reader’s attention for even the most banal statements (which, in its turn, invokes the gist of gawęda). 6. Quantitative assessment of syntactic markedness 6.1. Research question In their analysis of the Swedish translation of TransAtlantyk, Data-Bukowska and de Bończa Bukowski 2018 applied a qualitative approach, observing the syntactic overload of sentence-initial elements as its most marked stylistic feature. In this paper, we assess this same phenomenon quantitatively, based on a comparison to a syntactically annotated reference corpus. The research question was this: Is sentence-initial syntactic loading more prevalent in the Swedish translation of Trans-Atlantyk than is usual for written Swedish texts (and is this difference comparable to the that between the Polish Trans-Atlantyk and other written Polish texts)? To compare the sentence-initial syntactic loading (henceforth: left syntactic load) in the Swedish translation of Trans-Atlantyk with other Swedish texts, and in the original Polish with other Polish texts, we used a relatively large, high-quality parallel corpus with genre classification and a mostly manual sentence alignment. We operationalized the left syntactic load as the number of tokens preceding the finite verb of the main predicate. In the second step, we record the positions of subjects, objects, prepositional groups, and adverbs located to the left of the sentence predicate, along with the relative frequency (items per million) of sentences with that element fronted. We assumed that: 1. The predicate position index would be higher in the Swedish version of Trans-Atlantyk than in other Swedish texts (and the same for Polish). 2. The Swedish version of Trans-Atlantyk would contain more sentences per million with the given element fronted than other Swedish texts would (and the same for Polish). 3. The position indices of individual fronted clause elements would be higher in the Swedish version of Trans-Atlantyk than the position indices of the corresponding fronted clause elements in other Swedish texts (and again, the same for Polish). 6.2. Data Our reference corpora were the Polish and the Swedish subcorpora of the InterCorp collection, Version 13 ud Rosen et al. (2021). They contain 88 and 75 million tokens in total, respectively, divided into genres. Their morphological and syntactic annotation is performed in the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework (Nivre et al., 2020). We selected texts containing at least fifty sentences and discarded a few discussion transcripts from EUROPARL (Koehn, 2005) due to extremely erroneous parsing. 6.3. Data extraction The version of the InterCorp corpora used in this study is automatically lemmatized, morphologically tagged, and syntactically parsed, in keeping with the UD framework. InterCorp cannot be downloaded but is searchable with the KonText browser (Machálek, 2020). We queried InterCorp with the KonText API, which enables selected metadata items to be downloaded along with the query results. We requested the metadata attributes text_id and txttype (Tables 2 and 3 show the distribution of text across genres). Text type Tokens Discussions – Transcripts 15,147,245 Fiction 16,694,879 Nonfiction 716,776 Other 446,698 Religious 732,697 Subtitles 18,709,266 Table 2. Genres in InterCorp Swedish, Version 13-ud We formulated our searches as CQL queries (Evert and CWB Development Team, 2022), using the 8Silvie Cinková and Ewa Data-Bukowska Text type Tokens Discussions – Transcripts 14,667,833 Drama 42,952 Fiction 30,653,810 Journalism – commentaries 2,2027,476 Journalism – news 851,620 Legal texts 24,945,531 Nonfiction 897,641 Other 289,376 Religious 712,898 Subtitles 35,525,578 Table 3. Genres in InterCorp Polish, Version 13-ud Universal Dependencies markup. UD describes each sentence as a rooted syntactic dependency tree, with the predicate as the root. Autosemantic words always govern functional words. The syntactic relations between words are indicated by the deprel (dependency relation) attribute. Each word is tagged with a part of speech (upos) and some are further annotated with morphological features, such as number, case, or person, under the feats attribute. CQL Queries 1 and 2 illustrate the use of the linear corpus search to query syntactic dependency trees. The first example query identifies the finite form of a content verb (VERB) or an auxiliary verb (AUX), whose dependency relation is root. The second query searches for sentences with long sentence-initial segments, starting with an adverbial (always marked as an adverb in UD) ending with a finite predicate, as described in the first query. In addition, the adverbial must be syntactically governed by the predicate. Subsequent queries were formulated following the structure of the second one, differing only in terms of the restrictions on the initial element – including the following UD deprels: nominal subject (nsubj), content clause (ccomp, can be either object or subject clause), infinitive clause (xcomp), adverbial clause (advcl), nominal direct object (obj), nominal indirect object (iobj), and prepositional nominal group or oblique nominal group recognized as neither subject nor object (obl). CQL Query 1. Swedish finite verbs as roots [deprel = "root" & upos = "(VERB|AUX)" & feats="VerbForm=Fin"] CQL Query 2. Swedish adverbs preceding the finite predicate 1:[deprel = "advmod"] []* 2:[deprel = "root" & upos = "(VERB|AUX)" & feats="VerbForm=Fin"] & 1.head = 2.id within <s/> We harvested individual matches separately for each clause element, recording the text length (in words), genre, and the KWIC length. For the position of the finite predicate in the sentence, we also had KonText display the token ID. Apart from uniquely identifying a word, the token ID also encodes its position in the sentence. InterCorp contains the Polish original of TransAtlantyk, along with its translations into several languages, but not to Swedish. Therefore, we parsed its plain text with UDPipe (Straka and Straková, 2022) and uploaded it into the TEITOK corpus manager (Janssen, 2021), provided as a web-based service for individual users by the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ repository. Like KonText, TEITOK uses Corpus Workbench (Evert and CWB Development Team, 2022) and hence CQL, with minor differences. We experienced no issues translating the queries or making interoperable the respective outputs from TEITOK and KonText. 7. Analytical methods 7.1. Position of the finite predicate in Swedish The first research question concerned the position of the finite predicate in the Swedish translation of Trans-Atlantyk compared to other Swedish texts. We operationalized this as the arithmetic mean of predicate position indices (i.e. the number of tokens preceding the finite verb in each sentence) and compared it to the mean position of the finite predicate in each InterCorp genre available for Swedish in InterCorp. The InterCorp API did not allow retrieving mean positions of the finite predicate of individual texts. Therefore, to perform the comparison, we bootstrapped the mean position of the finite predicate in each genre. 7.2. Distance between a fronted clause element and the finite predicate in Swedish The second research question concerned the distance of a clause element in the fronted position before the finite predicate. First, we retrieved the sentence count of each text. Then we queried the API for each clause Short Article Title 9 element separately (nsubj,ccomp,xcomp,advcl,obj, iobj, and obl, cf. Section 6.3, CQL Queries 1 and 2). We computed the following statistics for each text and queried clause element: 1. the frequency, per million sentences, of the fronting of the given clause element; 2. the mean distance and the standard deviation of the KWIC length. 7.3. Reference experiment for Polish We repeated the same two experiments with the Polish original of Trans-Atlantyk and other texts in the Polish InterCorp subcorpus, following the analogous procedures. 8. Results 8.1. Results for the position of the finite predicate Table 4 presents the ranges of the bootstrapped mean of predicate position indices (the number of tokens preceding the finite verb in each sentence) in Swedish texts within each genre. With the mean of 5.30, the Swedish translation of Trans-Atlantyk exceeds the ranges of all recorded genres, indicating that TransAtlantyk is a clear outlier in Swedish in terms of predicate positioning. Nearly the same applies to all Polish genres, except for non-fiction (Table 5): the mean predicate position index exceeds the genre-wise maximum. Notably, the Polish original of Trans-Atlantyk falls below the bootstrapped range for non-fiction – with a high margin. Overall, then, in Swedish, we see a strong right shift of the predicate compared to all written genres, whereas in Polish, this applies to most genres except non-fiction. The margin varies between the languages, but in the religious texts and “Other”, it is somewhat smaller in Polish than in Swedish. On the other hand, in both languages, we observe an almost identical difference of Trans-Atlantyk values from the bootstrapped values in fiction texts. 8.2. Results for the distance between a fronted clause element and the finite predicate In this experiment, we observed fronted clause elements with respect to their frequency as well as to their distance from the finite predicate. We examined the data from three perspectives: frequency, mean, and standard deviation. We plotted the most interesting observations. In the plots, the x-axis represents the relative frequency and the y-axis represents the mean Genre Mean predicate position index Religious 1.00 - 3.50 Other 3.80 - 4.00 Nonfiction 4.70 - 4.85 Fiction 3.25 - 4.90 Trans-Atlantyk 5.30 Table 4. Bootstrapped mean predicate position index in Swedish written texts. Genre Mean predicate position index Religious 4.10 - 4.25 Other 4.80 - 5.00 Nonfiction 6.40 - 6.65 Fiction 4.27 - 5.00 Trans-Atlantyk 5.45 Table 5. Bootstrapped mean predicate position index in Polish written texts. KWIC length. The data points represent texts with their respective mean KWIC lengths and standard deviations. Trans-Atlantyk is highlighted by size and color. In a second step, we identified the top ten documents with respect to the frequency of the given fronted clause element - to identify representative works showing similarity to Trans-Atlantyk in this particular regard. The infinitive clause (xcomp) turned out to be the signature fronted clause element of Trans-Atlantyk, across genres and languages alike. Figures 1 and 2 show how extremely frequent fronted infinitive clauses were in both languages. In Swedish, they even tended to be further away from the finite predicate than in Polish. This is noteworthy, since Polish sentenceinitial position can theoretically be occupied by a deliberate number of clause elements, whereas the Swedish sentence-initial position accommodates only one. Such an enormous distance of the infinitive from the finite verb predicate indicates that the Swedish fronted infinitive clauses could even be loaded with an extraordinarily rich argument structure, or occur in a coordination. At the same time, we observed far more variance of that distance in Swedish than in Polish. Another very distinctly fronted clause element was the adverb in the position of a clause adverbial (advmod). Fronted adverbs occurred extremely frequently in the Swedish Trans-Atlantyk (Figure 3), while in Polish (Figure 4), they were frequent, but not genuine outliers. Neither their length nor their variance stood out.