1 Introduction

In Present-day English, there are three main nouns expressing the general meaning of ‘type’: type of, kind of and sort of. Traditionally, the type noun constructions are defined as nominal expressions dealing with (sub)categorization (Brems 2011, 2), or in other words, as nominal phrases used to ascribe a lexical item to a particular group or type sharing exact or similar features, i.e. dealing with taxonomic relationships, as in the example “a (special) sort of rose” (Traugott 2008, 226). The definition, however, applies only to the lexical meaning of these nouns. It must be admitted that, throughout the years, kind of and sort of, via the grammaticalization process, have gone through the pragmatic-semantic process of subjectification, which, according to Traugott (1995, 32), is:

a gradient phenomenon, whereby forms and constructions that at first express primarily concrete, lexical, and objective meanings come through repeated use in local syntactic contexts to serve increasingly abstract, pragmatic, interpersonal, and speaker-based functions.

Thus, the term type noun in this paper encompasses not only the primary lexical meaning, but is also used to account for other pragmatically charged uses of the items in question.

The English kind of and sort of have received a lot of attention in monolingual studies¹. It has been proved that kind of and sort of are extremely multifunctional (i.e. they may indicate a type or species, convey a vague reference, signal inadequate word choice, express imprecision or hesitation, diminish intensity, protect face, or fill in pauses, etc.). They have been investigated under different headers (e.g. species/type nouns, pragmatic markers, pragmatic particles, discourse markers, vagueness or fuzziness markers, hedges, downtoners, stance adverbials, adverbs of degree, etc.) (see Kay 1984; Holmes 1988; Aijmer 2002; Gries, David 2007; Davidse et al. 2008; Brems, Davidse 2010; Fetzer 2010; Margerie 2010; Kirk 2015, inter alia).

Though there have been a number of contrastive corpus-based studies of different discourse markers (DMs) carried out (see Aijmer, Simon-Vandenbergen 2003; Lewis 2006; Johansson 2007; Degand 2009; Beeching, Detges 2014; Furkó 2014 among others), which have resulted in prolific cross-linguistic and translation research output on English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian and other languages, contrastive parallel corpus-based studies of kind of and sort of in particular, involving two or more language sets, are extremely scarce. To my knowledge, one of the exceptions is Janebovà and Martinkovà’s paper (2017), which accounts for their research of kind of and sort of and their Czech correspondences in the English-Czech section of InterCorp. Their results demonstrated that the type nouns not only carry several distinct functions but also have an array of different translations in Czech. However, studies comparing kind of and sort of and their Lithuanian equivalents are non-existent.

This cross-linguistic research sets out to describe the quantitative and qualitative distribution of the English kind of and sort of, to determine the translational correspondences (TCs) of the two linguistic units in Lithuanian, as well as to reveal their functional diversity in terms of (inter)subjectivity (Traugott 2010), and to investigate how Lithuanian correspondences correlate with the function that kind of and sort of perform in original and translated fiction texts:²

1. (1) EN-orig: Usually Hatsumomo liked to drink a special kind of sake called amakuchi – which was very light and sweet.

   LT-trans: Paprastai Hacumomo mėgdavo gerti ypatingos rūšies sakę, vadinimą amakuči. Ji buvo labai silpna ir saldi.

2. (2) EN-orig: “You know what kind of chap I was.”

   LT-trans: – Tu ir pats žinai, kas aš per žmogus.

3. (3) EN-orig: “I sense youʼve heard of antimatter, Mr. Langdon?”<...> Langdon looked up. He felt suddenly dumb. “Yes. Well ... Sort of.”

   LT-trans: – Nujaučiu, jūs esate girdėjęs apie antimedžiagą, pone Lengdonai? <...> Lengdonas pažvelgė į ją. Kažkodėl jam užkando žadą. – Taip... Žinoma... Kažkas tokio.

The three examples above illustrate the range of meaning (from objective to (inter)subjective (Traugott 2010)) kind of and sort of may display: moving from a marker of a clear taxonomic relationship (1) to a more descriptive post-determiner use (2), and finally to a free adjunct functioning in the interpersonal domain (3).

2 From type nouns to discourse markers

Scholars seem to disagree on the exact number of the constructions the type nouns can appear in. However, traditionally there is a unanimous agreement that kind of and sort of may be used noun-phrase (NP) internally (i.e. nominal use) or noun-phrase externally, i.e. they may be exploited to modify adjectives, verbs and adverbs, prepositional phrases or function as completely independent units (i.e. free adjuncts) modifying whole propositions.

When kind of and sort of are used NP-internally, the first construction they appear in is the binominal one (Denison 2005; Traugott 2008), also known as lexical-head use (Davidse et al. 2008, 147), in which the type noun has a generic reference, is used in hyponymy statements, and denotes a specific subclass or, as in example (1) above and examples (4) and (5):

1. (4) EN-orig: They fill you with bubbles, and the bubbles are full of a special kind of gas, and this gas is so terrifically lifting that it lifts you right off the ground just like a balloon

   <...>.

2. (5) EN-orig: He untied it and took out a short, fat scroll, which he began to unroll. It was cracked with age and showed-in miniature-brilliantly colored scenes of the Imperial court. If you've ever seen this sort of scroll, you'll know that you can unroll it all the way across a room <...>.

Here the type noun is the head and the of-phrase is its modifier (Brems, Davidse 2010)³. The binominal kind of and sort of may “either introduce a (potential) discourse topic or refer back to an existing discourse topic” (Keizer 2007, 155-156). The type noun can be both singular and plural in number and all determiners are freely available in the pre-modification field of the phrase (Traugott 2008, 234; Denison 2005). They are not restricted to affirmative environments but can also appear in questions.

The second construction of the nominal kind of and sort of is the qualifying construction (Denison 2005), or degree modifier (Traugott 2008, 226-227), which “is the only one that is unanimously recognized besides the head use” (Davidse et al. 2008, 156). The qualifying construction, in contrast to the binominal construction, does not carry a generic reference; here the type noun functions as a discourse marker and hedge and “conveys that the description is only approximate” (Davidse et al. 2008, 157) or, according to Traugott (2008, 227), “[p]ragmatically such phrases cast doubt on the accuracy of the description”, e.g.:

1. (6) EN-orig: “I think that was a sort of joke,” Mameha said.

In this construction the type nouns are modifiers having the meaning of more or less or somewhatand “NP2 is perspectivized as in the foreground” (Traugott (2008, 226-27). Here the type noun normally occurs in its singular form and is preceded by an indefinite determiner or no determiner at all.

Alongside the two above-mentioned NP-internal constructions, kind of and sort of can be used NP-externally, i.e. they can appear in adverbialconstructions where they function as unquestionable discourse markers (Kay 1984, 158; Dehé, Stathi 2016, 917). They can modify adjectives (7), verbs (8), adverbs (9), prepositional phrases. and entire clauses (10) or function as stand-alone adjuncts (11), for instance:

1. (7) EN-orig: Most of it was kind of silly.

2. (8) EN-orig: I sort of like you.

3. (9) EN-orig: She sort of accidentally made it sound like I was trying to kill myself or something.

4. (10) EN-orig: That's kind of how they got into this mess in the first place.

5. (11) EN-orig: At least it smelled clean. Sort of.

The non-NP internal construction fulfils numerous “discourse functions such as self-repair, hedging strong opinions, establishing common ground between interlocutors, politeness, and so forth” (Dehé, Stathi 2016, 918).

In addition to the binominal, qualifying and adverbial constructions, a number of other constructions are recognised in the literature. One of them is the post-determiner/complex determiner construction where kind of and sort of also feature noun-phrase internally. The question whether the type noun is the head of the NP or not remains to be open. Denison (2005) seems not to offer a straightforward answer whether this is a distinct construction at all. Keizer (2007) considers this construction as a sub-group of the binominal construction; however, Davidse et al. (2008), Brems and Davidse (2010), and Janebovà and Martinkovà (2017) treat this construction as a separate one as “[t]he post-determiner construction is the result of reanalysis of the binominal construction” (Brems, Davidse 2010, 181); it no longer has a generic reference, but has a mainly textual function and displays phoric (anaphoric and cataphoric) relations, so it should be treated as a distinct category, i.e. instead of being strictly taxonomic, these units have their meaning expanded to put forward the idea of a description or indication that something is of a certain nature:

1. (12) EN-orig: Unfortunately it was the kind of job that only keeps hands busy.

Another pattern proposed by Davidse et al. (2008) is a quantifying construction. This construction is quite special, because, due to lexicalization, the type nouns in plural appear in fixed phrases with all and carry the meaning of ‘many/much’:

1. (13) EN-orig: Fache had posited all kinds of explanations tonight to explain Sophie's odd behavior <...>.

In addition to quantifying uses with all, negative totality quantifiers as no or (not. anyalso fall under this category.

Finally, the NP-internal kind of and sort of can function as modifiers. The main characteristic of the modifier use of the type nouns is the use of an adjective or a noun that is more related to N2 than the type noun itself, for instance:

1. (14) It’s a cool quirky kind of song. (Davidse et al. 2008, 147)

Here kind of and sort of have a metalinguistic value, indicating that the lexical items preceding them “have to be interpreted as ad hoc, often very creative, classifiers” (Brems, Davidse 2010, 188). They also act pragmatically, signalling that “the description is only approximative” (ibid.). In this paper a distinction is made between the propositional use of kind of and sort of expressing ‘a type of’ and their discourse marker use. All the cases of sort of and kind of where they do not mean ‘a type of’ are treated as having a discourse qualifying value, i.e. functioning as discourse markers (Aijmer 2002, 178). Discourse markers are perceived as having “by definition a discourse function, which entails indexing the utterances to the surrounding discourse, both in terms of structuring the ongoing discourse and in terms of signalling to the addressee how he/she should interpret the speaker’s stance” (Wichmann et al. 2010, 107).

3 Data and Methods

The present paper deals with a quantitative and qualitative contrastive corpus-based analysis drawing on the data extracted from a self-compiled bidirectional parallel corpus – ParaCorp_EN→LT→EN (Šolienė 2013). The corpus is compiled according to the model of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (Johansson 2007). The ParaCorp_EN→LT→EN comprises original English (British and American) fiction texts and their translations into Lithuanian and original Lithuanian fiction texts and their translations into English. The choice of the data was determined by several circumstances. Firstly, fiction embodies a wide spectrum of linguistic output and style, including features of spoken discourse, with which kind of and sort of are generally associated (Biber et al. 1999, 869). Secondly, such a corpus design is advantageous as it offers different directions of linguistic comparison and can be used both as a parallel corpus and a comparable corpus (Johansson 2007, 11). The corpus consists of about 5 million running tokens (see Table 1).

In order to generate concordance lines with the type nouns kind of and sort of as well as their translations, the multilingual concordancer ParaConc (Barlow 1995) was used. The corpus output files in the plain text format were imported into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis. The search was bidirectional: first, kind of and sort of were searched as nodes in the EN-orig  LT-trans direction; second, they were entered as nodes in the EN-trans  LT-orig search direction. Table 2 shows the raw frequency of the items under investigation:

It is important to note that the cases where kind of was used as an adjective in the structure kind of somebody to + verb were discarded from the analysis as a first step before any calculation. Based on the raw frequency count, it was decided to take 200 randomized hits from the EN-orig texts and 100 randomized hits from the EN-trans texts of each kind of and sort of from both sub-corpora for further functional analysis. All in all, there were 600 cases of the use of kind of and sort of analysed. The randomization procedure was performed using the RAND function available in the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet – each occurrence of the node in question was assigned with a random number from 0 to 1. Then the numbers were ranked from the lowest to the highest and the first 200 and 100 hits were selected for the analysis.

Though the data extraction and randomization were automatic, the qualitative analysis of the concordances was carried out manually. Firstly, the uses of the type nouns were divided into two groups depending on whether they function NP-internally or NP-externally. The NP- internal cases were grouped into the ones expressing ‘type of’ and the ones functioning as DMs. All of the non-internal cases were categorised according to the item they modify or act as a stand-alone adjunct. Finally, their translational correspondences as well as different functions were considered.

On the basis of the empirical data derived from a parallel corpus we can establish translation paradigms (Johansson 2007, 23) or semantic mirrors (Dyvik 2004, 311) which contain translational correspondences. First, we can divide TCs according to the direction of translation. Then having analysed the TCs of a linguistic unit in question in terms of expression, we can single out zero and overt correspondences. The latter fall into two groups:

congruent .direct) and non-congruent .divergent) correspondences. Congruent correspondence is the case when a linguistic item is translated into another language keeping the same part of speech (form and meaning); there is no system shift (Johansson, 2007, 24), for example:

1. (15) EN-orig: There was this new kind of cancer that was getting young men.

   LT-trans: Dabar atsiradusi nauja vėžio rūšis, kuria serga jauni vyrai.

Divergent correspondences, on the other hand, are more interesting for contrastive studies, as they “serve[…] as a means of uncovering differences where they may be unexpected” (Johansson 2007, 25). These are the cases when, from the perspective of meaning, a greater or lesser part of meaning of the SL text is compensated in the TL by various means, usually not listed in dictionaries as traditional prototypical equivalents (Usonienė 2006, 101), for instance:

1. (16) EN-orig: He was determined to make this some kind of double date, apparently.

   LT-trans: Aišku, buvo pasiryžęs padaryti tarsi kokį dvigubą pasimatymą.

Zero correspondences are cases where there is no clearly identifiable semantic counterpart in the TL or SL text (Johansson 2007, 26). Sometimes translators decide to omit a word or phrase in translation (omission), as in (17), or add some new shades of meaning in TL texts that were absent in the original (addition), as in (18):

1. (17) EN-orig: And the kind of medicine Peeta needs would have been at a premium from the beginning.

   LT-trans: O ø vaistai, kurių reikia Pitui, jau iš pradžių kainavo labai daug.

2. (18) LT-orig: Galėčiau tai pavadinti ø drama, kurioje asmeninei patirčiai tenka ne menkiausias vaidmuo.

   EN-trans: I could even say it is a sort of drama, one in which my personal experiences have ended up playing a not insignificant role.

The Lithuanian TCs of kind of and sort of were categorised according to the three above- mentioned types.

4 Results

This section presents the quantitative and qualitative findings of the analysis. It starts with the analysis of the quantitative distribution of kind of and sort of (Section 4.1). The subsequent sub-sections further elaborate on both quantitative and qualitative findings.

4.1 Ǫuantitative distribution of kind of and sort of

The normalized frequency (per 10,000 words) of kind of and sort of in both the original and translated English texts is presented in Table 3. The table gives all the relevant occurrences of kind of and sort of in the corpus.

Though the frequencies seem to be more or less levelled out across the different sub-corpora, the only discrepancy that strikes the eye is the overuse of kind of in the EN-trans texts in comparison with sort of. The reason behind this might be the fact that the majority of the translators in ParaCorp_EN→LT→EN are American English-based bilinguals, and some studies proved that kind of is much more frequent in American English than in British English (see Biber et al. 1999, 870; Quirk et al. 1985, 598).

4.1.1 The NP-external use of kind of and sort of

The non-internal use of the items under study turned out to be extremely infrequent. Out of 400 cases (200 of kind of and 200 of sort of) where the type nouns appeared in the EN-orig texts, only 18 cases of kind of and 35 cases of sort of were non-internal, which makes only 13.3 % of all of the concordances analysed (53 cases in total). Correspondingly, the NP-internal use makes up 86.7 %. Table 4 shows the parts of speech the type nouns have scope over.

As seen from Table 4, the type nouns modified verbs most frequently, adjectives taking the second place. The findings are in line with Aijmer (2002). Her results demonstrated that, for example, sort of “was especially frequent before NP (42.1 %) and before VP (36 %)” (Aijmer 2002, 183). The cases were the type noun featured as a stand-alone marker exclusively appeared with sort of only, which might imply that “<...> kind of strongly prefers to modify nouns and adjectives while sort of strongly prefers to modify whole propositions, adverbs and verbs” (Gries, David 2007).

The investigation of kind of and sort of in the EN-trans texts only confirmed the tendency. Even fewer cases of the non-internal use of the type nouns were identified – out of 200 cases (100 of kind of and 100 of sort of) there were only three cases of non-internal use: one case where sort of modified an adjective, one case where kind of modified a verb and one case where it modified an adjective, which makes only 1.5 % of the NP non-internal use. The rest 88.5 % of the concordance witnesses NP-internal use.

4.1.2 The NP-internal use of kind of and sort of

As has already been mentioned, the prevailing use of kind of and sort of in the EN-orig and EN-trans texts was NP-internal. Table 5 and Table 6 present the distribution of the NP- internal use in accordance with the propositional use indicating ‘a type of’ and the qualifying use when the items under study do not show any referential potential but function as discourse markers, downtoners or hedges (Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999; Keizer 2007; Dehé, Stathi 2016).

As is obvious from the tables above, sort of conveyed pragmatic meanings more often than kind of in both sub-corpora. Its use as a discourse marker is almost twice more frequent than that of kind of (62 % vs. 37 % in the EN-orig texts and 60 % vs. 32 % in the EN-trans texts). The findings are in line with Aijmer (2002), who noted that “kind of is not used to the same extent as sort of at least on the British scene” (Aijmer 2002, 207). In her data kind of was used as a clear discourse marker only in 17.8 %. The reason for this is hard to find. One of the tentative observations might be the findings presented by Brems and Davidse (2010, 193), whose diachronic analysis shows a constant growth of the use of kind of in the binominal construction from the year of 1780 to the present day.

4.2 Translational correspondences and functions

4.2.1 The NP-internal kind of and sort of as ‘a type of’

The whole range of TCs of kind of and sort of denoting a type of something is presented in Table 7. The TCs kažkoks, kažkokia, kažkokie, kažkokių ‘somewhat’ or, for example, tie, tų, toms ‘these’ and other forms were regarded as a single form as Lithuanian is an inflected language showing case, number and gender agreement. Since there seemed to be no variation in the TCs of kind of and sort of in the two sub-corpora, all of them are summed up together.

Table 7 demonstrates that the congruent TCs of kind of and sort of indicating a type are very rare (1.2 %). There are only 3 cases where they are rendered by rūšis ʻspeciesʼ, kategorija ʻcategoryʼ, and tipas ʻtypeʼ (see (19)):

1. (19) EN-orig: He was that kind of guy.

   LT-trans: Tokiai vaikinų kategorijai jis priklausė.

The majority of translational correspondences were divergent and included demonstrative pronouns such as tie/šie‘those/these’ and toks/šitoks ‘such’, which are generally used to refer back to some information mentioned before or something that will be presented later:

1. (20) LT-orig: Blogiausia, kad tokios neapykantos neišperka meilė.

   EN-trans: The worst of it is that love doesn't compensate for that kind of hatred.

2. (21) EN-orig: I always thought that a veruca was a sort of wart that you got on the sole of your foot!

   LT-trans: Aš visada maniau, kad Veruka - tai tokia karpa, kuri atsiranda ant kojos pado!

The results show that wh-questions with kind of and sort of quite frequently denoted a type and their Lithuanian TCs mostly encompass koks or kas ‘what/who’, for example:

1. (22) LT-orig: Koks gali būti nuolankumas šiais laikais, kai vyrų ir moterų teisės lygios!

   EN-trans: What kind of humility can there be these days when men and women have equal rights!

The findings seem to coincide with the ones obtained by Janebová and Martinková (2017), as their study unveiled that in such contexts the Czech equivalents of the type nouns “were phoric expressions (demonstrative pronouns, phoric expressions meaning “similar” or “same”, and adjectives and adverbs referring to the common ground such as “typical”, “precise/ly”, or “definite”” (Janebová, Martinková 2017, 205).

4.2.2 Kind of and sort of as discourse markers

The TCs of kind of and sort of functioning as discourse markers in the EN-orig texts are displayed in Table 8 below. The cases of their non-internal use (i.e. the adverbial constructions) have been added to the total.

A great variety of TCs reveal the multifunctional nature of the two items in question. Naturally, the translational correspondences of the two DMs could not be congruent. The divergent TCs included a variety of words, such as kažkoks/koks nors ‘something like’ (20 %), tartum/tarsi, lyg (ir) and it ‘as if’ (15 %), savotiškas ‘peculiar’ (8 %). The other various TCs make up (9.6 %).

The translational profile of kind of and sort of as DMs in the EN-trans texts yielded somewhat similar results (see Table 9); however, the range of TCs is much narrower. The three cases of their non-internal use (i.e. the adverbial constructions) have been added to the total, too. The reason for a less divergent translational profile might be the fact that Lithuanian does not have fully grammaticalized equivalents for the English type nouns; other means of expression of approximation or mitigation may be in use, which did not fall under the scope of the paper.

As seen from the tables, in both sub-corpora the pronominal strategy of TCs predominates. The most frequent TCs remain the same: kažkas/kažkoks ‘something like’ (20 % and 21 %). The great diversity of TCs of kind of and sort of might suggest that there is no closely related one- to-one correspondence between the two DMs in question and their Lithuanian equivalents as is the case of the DM well and its prototypical Lithuanian counterpart na (Šolienė 2020). Her study showed that almost half (47.3 %) of the cases of the use of na were rendered as well into English. The strikingly high percentage of zero correspondence (48 % and 41 %) is also indicative of the functional versatility as well as of the absence of direct equivalents of kind of and sort of in Lithuanian. The phenomenon of zero correspondence was also attested for kind of and sort of in their propositional meaning when they denoted a type (24 %). It will be separately discussed in sub-section 4.2.3 below.

When it comes to the correlation of the function of kind of and sort of in discourse and their Lithuanian TCs, a number of observations can be made. First of all, the two items under study can perform textual and interpersonal functions. For example, Aijmer (2002, 191) claims that sort of can be used epistemically (evidentially) to mark imprecision and self repair and affectively (interpersonally) to downtone and hedge strong opinions. It must be noted that a clear boundary between different functions is hard to draw since very often they overlap (Beeching 2016, 158–159).

The pronominal strategy in translation may be so frequent because pronouns can perform a wide range of functions, especially when they are combined with the particles lyg or tarsi. For instance, koks, kažkoks, kažin koks ‘something like‘ allow the speaker to indicate that the concept is in some way peculiar and he/she cannot recognize it or tell exactly what it is:

1. (23) EN-orig: Professor Lupin had compiled the most unusual exam any of them had ever taken; a sort of obstacle course outside in the sun, where they had to wade across a deep paddling pool <...>.

   LT-trans: Profesorius Lubinas jį parengė neregėtai įdomiai: kieme, saulės atokaitoje, jų laukė tarsi koks kliūčių ruožas. Jie turėjo perbristi gilų baseinėlį <...>.

2. (24) EN-orig: <...> I didnʼt feel terror so much as a kind of vague queasiness.

   LT-trans: <...> siaubo nejaučiau, tik kažkokį miglotą nerimą.

In (23) and (24) the speaker is looking for the appropriate word to describe a range of obstacles or to name a feeling at the same time conveying his/her subjective attitude.

The adjectival TCs of kind of and sort of show that the speaker keeps the description at a fuzzy level, too. The most frequent TCs are savotiškas ʻpeculiarʼ and panašus ʻsimilarʼ, which express non-typicality, vagueness and imprecision:

1. (25) EN-orig: He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear <...>.

   LT-trans: Jis su savotiška nuostaba pagalvojo apie biologinį skausmo ir baimės nereikalingumą <...>.

2. (26) EN-orig: He remembered a cell with a plank bed, a sort of shelf sticking out from the wall, and a tin wash-basin <...>.

   LT-trans: Jis prisiminė kitą kamerą su lentine lova, panašia į lentyną prie sienos, ir skardine praustuve <...>.

Interestingly, the analysis revealed that the phrase kind/sort of thing was quite common in the corpus. Beeching (2016, 158) calls this lexicalised chunk as “the general extender” and maintains that it “also serves, retroactively, to hedge or downplay any perceived conceitedness and thus serves as a face-threat mitigator”. In my dataset it usually appeared as part of a sentence (27) or as a stand-alone unit (28). The TCs included phrases such as panašiai ‘similarly’, panašūs dalykai ‘similar things’ kažkas tokio ‘something like’ and maždaug taip ‘approximately’, which is also a means to convey vagueness and imprecision:

1. (27) EN-orig: Not in a bad way, just to calm someone down, that kind of thing.

   LT-trans: Ne blogąja prasme, tik norėdamas nuraminti kitus, kažkas tokio.

2. (28) EN-orig: Black eyes. Missing teeth. That sort of thing.

   LT-trans: Su mėlynėmis po akims. Be dantų. Ir panašiai.

The greatest variety of TCs was attested in the intersubjective domain: tartum/tarsi.lyg (ir)/it ‘as if’, kažkaip ‘somewhat’, galima sakyti/pavadinti ‘it can be said’, kaip ir ‘somehow’, atrodo ‘it seems’, etc. The most frequent TCs were tartum/tarsi.lyg (ir)/it ‘as if’ which seem to be the closest equivalent to kind of/sort of as they may equally show inexactness; serve as discourse markers that weaken the illocutionary force and flag the speaker’s uncertainty, as in (29)-(31):

1. (29) EN-orig: "He never really got to the point." "You looked kind of mad," she fished. "Did I?" I kept my expression blank.

   LT-trans: - Jis taip tiesiai ir neprisipažino.

   - Atrodei lyg ir supykusi, - tardė ji.

   - Tikrai? - nustebusi pažiūrėjau į ją.

2. (30) LT-orig: Turi lyg ir savo savivaldą.

   EN-trans: It has its own sort of self-rule.

3. (31) EN-orig: My great-grandpa, Ephraim Black, was sort of the last chief we had <...>.

   LT-trans: Mano senelis Efraimas Blekas buvo tarsi paskutinis mūsų vadas <...>.

In the examples above the speaker tries to make his/her opinion sound safely vague and thus softens the effect of his/her assertion. Example (29) is also a case of the speaker’s unwillingness to impose on the hearer, by using lyg ir ‘as if’ he/she tries to save the interlocutor’s face.

Finally, there are TCs such as beveik ʻalmostʼ, gana ʻsomewhatʼ, and kažkaip ʻsomehowʼ, which downtone the proposition, but at the same time explicate the meaning of imprecision and approximation, for example:

1. (32) EN-orig: Iʼve moved out. Sort of, anyway.

   LT-trans: Na, beveik išsikrausčiau.

2. (33) EN-orig: It was kind of childish, really.

   LT-trans: Tai buvo gana vaikiška.

The two units in question may also signal a close relationship between the speakers. They “make inferences or assumptions about each other’s knowledge” (Aijmer 2002, 202), for example:

1. (34) EN-orig: “He works at Hogwarts.”

   “Oh,” said the boy, “I’ve heard of him. He’s a sort of servant, isn’t he?” “He’s the gamekeeper,” said Harry.

   LT-trans: - Dirba Hogvartse.

   - Aaa, girdėjau. Jis ten lyg ir tarnas?

   - Sargas, - atšovė Haris, vis labiau nemėgdamas vaikėzo.

In example (34) the boy makes an inference that a person is a servant based on the hearsay and general knowledge and at the same time seeks a confirmation from his interlocutor. The Lithuanian correspondence lyg ir ‘as if’ mitigates the question. In such contexts the Lithuanian correspondences also include galima sakyti ‘it can be said’:

1. (35) EN-orig: “If we are dealing with newborns, he’ll be helpful.” “Jasper? Why?” Edward smiled darkly.

   “Jasper is sort of an expert on young vampires.”

   LT-trans: - Jis padės susitvarkyti su naujagimiais.

   - Džasperis? Kaip? – Edvardas niūriai šyptelėjo.

   - Džasperis, galima sakyti, yra jaunų vampyrų specialistas.

Even though Edward does not seem to have a clue why Jasper may be useful in dealing with newborns, the initiator of the dialogue appeals to common knowledge that he wants to share. The implication is that in general Jasper is known to be a good specialist when it comes to dealing with young vampires. Here galima sakyti ‘it can be said’ could be substituted by žinok ‘you know’.

The varied list of TCs may prove that Lithuanian does not have a single equivalent for the two multifunctional units discussed herein. Also, it is sometimes difficult to disentangle different functions performed by kind of and sort of since they overlap (Beeching 2016, 160).

4.2.3 Zero correspondence

Overall, zero correspondence is a unifying feature of DMs in cross-linguistic studies (Johansson 2007, 26). Due to their extreme multifunctionality, non-propositionality, context-dependence and non-referential (textual and interpersonal) function, they exhibit a wide array of different TCs and their exact cross-linguistic equivalent is hard to find. The cases of zero correspondence of kind of and sort of as DMs amount to 48 % in the LT-trans texts. Even though they had no particular source in the LT-orig texts, the two DMs were also inserted in the English translations quite frequently (41 %). The propositional type noun usage in the present study also showed a relatively high percentage of zero correspondence (24 %). Similar findings are presented in Janebová and Martinková (2017, 188): even more than a half of kind of and sort of uses have no Czech correspondences in their dataset.

One of the factors determining zero correspondence of the type nouns might be the redundancy factor and the language norm, e.g.:

1. (36) EN-orig: His lips pulled back over his teeth and his eyes shone with an odd light – a wild, fierce kind of hope.

   LT-trans: Dantys prasišiepė, akyse blykstelėjo keista ugnelė – nuožmi, beprotiška ø viltis.

Example (36) is typical of the pattern modifier + kind of/sort of + NP, which is especially inclined to have kind of/sort of omitted in translation, seemingly because Lithuanian does not require an additional mediator between the modifiers and the modified head.

In addition, the language norm might also be an explanation why kind of and sort of are inserted into the English translation; it seems that it is more natural to resort to mitigation strategies in English:

1. (37) LT-orig: – øDurnystė visa tai, – sako ilgšis, – verčiau parodom jam jo nupjautą galvą. EN-trans: "This is some kind of idiocy," says the beanpole. "It'd be better if we showed him his chopped-off head."

It is important to note that sometimes the meaning conveyed by kind of and sort of is completely reversed in translation, i.e. a mitigated English statement is rendered as an assertion into Lithuanian, for instance:

1. (38) EN-orig: It’s kind of obvious, when you think about it <...>.

   LT-trans: Geriau pagalvojus, dalykas visiškai aiškus <...>.

2. (39) EN-orig: Potions lessons were turning into a sort of weekly torture, Snape was so horrible to Harry.

   LT-trans: Nuodų ir vaistų pamokos virto tikra kankyne – Sneipas ėste ėdė Harį.

Kind of in (38) is used to mitigate face threats. By opting for kind of obvious the speaker has an intention to save his/her or the interlocutor’s face. Kind of here softens a strongly voiced opinion, whereas, on the contrary, visiškai ʻcompletelyʼ shows sheer confidence and marks a reinforced statement. In (39) tikra ‘real’ functions as an intensifier; it exaggerates the semantics of the already emotionally charged word kankynė ‘torture’.

5 Conclusion

The present paper reports on the multifunctional English type nouns kind of and sort of and their Lithuanian correspondences in a contrastive perspective. There have been a lot of monolingual studies that analysed the English type nouns in terms of their structure or function in different perspectives, but contrastive corpus-based studies comparing two or more languages are rather scarce. This paper aims to describe the quantitative and qualitative distribution of the English kind of and sort of, to determine their translational correspondences in Lithuanian, as well as to reveal their functional diversity. The research method is a quantitative and qualitative contrastive analysis based on data extracted from the self-compiled bidirectional corpus ParaCorp_EN→LT→EN comprising fiction texts.

The results show kind of and sort of are prone to be used NP-internally; however, even in this construction they can feature as DMs. Kind of and sort of function as unambiguous DMs when they completely lose their nominality, i.e. are used NP-externally. Sort of conveyed pragmatic meanings more often than kind of in both sub-corpora, whereas kind of was more frequently used propositionally to indicate a type.

The functional and semantic potential of the type nouns is fully reflected by their TCs. Very rarely kind of and sort of are translated congruently into a type noun (rūšis ‘kind’, kategorija ‘category’ and tipas ‘type’); even though they denote a type and are used propositionally, they usually correspond to demonstrative pronouns such as tie/šie ‘those/these’ and toks/šitoks ‘such’ in Lithuanian.

The translational profile has revealed that certain functions of kind of and sort of as DMs, such as textual and interpersonal, may be realised by different Lithuanian TCs which may help establish the common ground between the speaker and the hearer or refer to the previous context, may indicate epistemic imprecision, approximation or may downtone a proposition (cf. Janebová, Martinková 2017, 209). The most common TCs included kažkas/kažkoks ‘something like’, kažin koks/kokia ‘somewhat’, tartum/tarsi.lyg (ir)/it ‘as if’, beveik ʻalmostʼ, gana ʻsomewhatʼ, kažkaip ʻsomehow’, etc. Finally, the same TCs may appear in both functions, which may be indicative of the functional overlap.

The high number of zero correspondence has also revealed some differences between English and Lithuanian. First of all, it is obvious that due to the multifunctional nature and context-dependence of kind of and sort of their exact cross-linguistic equivalents are hard to find. Second, it signals that the Lithuanian type nouns have not advanced on the grammaticalization path the way the English type nouns have and there is no one-to-one correspondence of the forms. Moreover, it seems that the two languages do not put the same emphasis on the mitigation and politeness strategies. Discourse markers are a feature of vague language; their precise meaning is difficult to pin down, so they disappear in translation very frequently.

As this particular research was based on a quite limited number of fiction texts, the analysis of larger corpora encompassing different registers, for example, spoken or academic, would provide more interesting and insightful results. Further research could also include the plural forms kinds of and sorts of. Moreover, the most frequent Lithuanian TCs of kind of and sort of toks/šitoks ‘such’ and kažkas/kažkoks ‘something like’ should not escape further analysis.

Agnosce

Thanks are due to the Research Council of Lithuania, which funded this research within the framework of project No. S-MIP-17-44 (Discourse markers in Lithuanian: A synchronic and diachronic study). I am sincerely grateful to the two reviewers for their helpful comments and critical remarks on the original draft, which have substantially improved the final version of the paper. Any errors that remain are my sole responsibility.

References

Aijmer Karin 2002, English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Aijmer Karin, Simon-Vandenbergen Anne-Marie 2003, The discourse particle well and its equivalents in Swedish and Dutch, Linguistics 41(6), 1123-1161.

Barlow Michael 1995, A Guide to ParaConc, Athelstan: Houston.

Beeching Kate 2016, Pragmatic Markers in British English: Meaning in Social Interaction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beeching Kate, Detges Ulrich (eds.) 2014, Functions at the left and right periphery: Crosslinguistic investigations of language change, Leiden: Brill.

Biber, Douglas, Johansson Stig, Leech Geoffrey, Conrad Susan, Finegan Edward (eds.) 1999, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, London: Longman.

Brems Lieselotte 2011, Layering of size and type noun constructions in English, Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.

Brems Lieselotte, Davidse Kristin 2010, The Grammaticalisation of Nominal Type Noun Constructions with kind/sort of: Chronology and Paths of Change, English Studies 91(2), 180-202.

Davidse Kristin, Brems Lieselotte, De Smedt Liesbeth 2008. Type noun uses in the English NP. A case of right to left layering, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13(2), 139-168.

Degand Liesbeth 2009, On describing polysemous discourse markers. What does translation add to the picture? In From will to well. Studies in Linguistics offered to Anne-Marie Simon- Vandenbergen, Slembrouck Stef, Taverniers Miriam, Van Herreweghe Mieke, eds., Gent: Academia Press, 173-183.

Dehé Nicole, Stathi Katerina 2016, Grammaticalization and prosody: The case of English sort/kind/type of constructions, Language 92(4), 911-946.

Denison David 2005, The Grammaticalisations of Sort of, Kind of and Type of in English. Paper presented at New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3, Santiago de Compostela, July 17– 20. http://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/llc/files/david-denison/Santiago_NRG3_paper.pdf.

Dyvik Helge 2004, Translations as semantic mirrors: from parallel corpus to Wordnet, Language and Computers 49(1), 311-326.

Fetzer Anita 2010. Hedges in context: form and function of sort of and kind of. In New Approaches to Hedging, Kaltenböck Gunther, Mihatsch Witrud, Schneider Stefan, eds., Bingley: Emerald, 49-71.

Furkó Bálint Péter 2014, Perspectives on the translation of discourse markers, Acta Universitatis Spientiae, Philologica 6, 181-196.

Gries Stephan Th., David Caroline V. 2007, This is kind of/sort of interesting: variation in hedging in English, In Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English. Volume 2. Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies, Päivi Pahta, Taavitsainen Irma, Nevalainen Terttu, Tyrkkö Jukka, eds., https://varieng.helsinki.fi/series/volumes/02/gries_david/

Holmes Janet 1988, Sort of in New Zealand Women’s and Men’s Speech, Studia Linguistica 42(2), 85–121.

Janebová Markéta, Martinková Michaela 2017, NP-Internal Kind of and Sort of: Evidence from an English-Czech Parallel Translation Corpus, In Contrasting English and Other Languages through Corpora, Janebová Markéta, Lapshinova-Koltunski Ekaterina, Martinková Michaela, eds., Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 164-218.

Johansson Stig 2007, Seeing through Multilingual Corpora: On the use of corpora in contrastive studies, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Kay Paul 1984, The Kind of/Sort of Construction, In Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 157–171.

Keizer Evelien 2007. The English Noun Phrase: The Nature of Linguistic Characterization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kirk John M. 2015, Kind of and sort of: Pragmatic discourse markers in the SPICE-Ireland Corpus, In Pragmatic Markers in Irish English, Amador-Moreno Carolina P., McCafferty Kevin, Vaughan Elaine, eds., Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 89-113.

Kolyaseva Alena, Davidse Kristin 2016, A typology of lexical and grammaticalized uses of Russian tip, Leuven Working Papers in Linguistics (5), 171–210.

Lewis Diana 2006, Contrastive analysis of adversative relational markers, using comparable corpora, In Pragmatic Markers in Contrast, Aijmer Karin, Simon-Vandenbergen Anne- Marie, eds., Oxford: Elsevier, 139–153.

Margerie Hélène 2010, On the rise of (inter)subjective meaning in the grammaticalization of kind of .kinda, In Subjectification, intersubjectification and grammaticalization, Davidse Kristin, Vandelanotte Lieven, Cuyckens Hubert, eds., Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 315– 346.

Quirk Rudolf, Greenbaum Sidney, Leech Geoffrey, Svarvik Jan 1985, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, London: Longman.

Šolienė Audronė 2013, Episteminio modalumo ekvivalentiškumo parametrai anglų ir lietuvių kalbose. Humanitariniy moksly daktaro disertacija, Vilnius: Vilniaus universitetas.

Šolienė Audronė 2020, Lithuanian discourse markers na and nu: A glimpse at Lithuanian- English parallel corpus data, In Translating and Comparing Languages: Corpus-based Insights, Granger Sylviane, Lefer Marie-Aude, eds., Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 237–255.

Traugott Elizabeth Closs 1995, Subjectification in grammaticalisation, In Subjectivity and Subjectivisation: Linguistic Perspectives, Stein Dieter, Wright Susan, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31–54.

Traugott Elizabeth Closs 2008, Grammaticalization, constructions and the incremental development of language: Suggestions from the development of degree modifiers in English, In Language Evolution: Cognitive and Cultural Factors, Eckardt Regine, Jaeger Gerhart, Veenstra Tonjes, eds., Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 219-240.

Traugott Elizabeth Closs 2010, (Inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification: A reassessment, In Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, Davidse Kristin, Vandelanotte Lieven, Cuyckens Hubert, eds., Berlin: De Gruyter, 29–71.

Usonienė Aurelija 2006, Episteminio modalumo raiška. Ekvivalentiškumo bruožai angly ir lietuviy kalbose, Darbai ir dienos 45, 97–108.

Wichmann Anne, Simon-Vandenbergen Anne-Marie, Aijmer Karin 2010, How prosody reflects semantic change: A synchronic case study of of course. In Subjectification, intersubjectification and grammaticalization, Davidse Kristin, Vandelanotte Lieven, Cuyckens Hubert, eds., Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 103–54.

Data sources

ParaCorpEN→LT→EN Bidirectional Parallel Corpus of English and Lithuanian (Šolienė 2013)

List of Abbreviations

#: raw frequency DM(s) – discourse marker(s)

EN: English

f: normalized frequency

LT: Lithuanian

N2: the second noun within the noun phrase

NP: noun phrase

Ø: zero correspondence

orig: original texts

SL: source language

TC(s): translational correspondence(s)

TL: target language

trans: translated texts

VP: verb phrase

Notes