Conveying the augmentative semantics of nouns in literary translation (based on the Russian-German Subcorpus of Russian National Corpus)

The paper is devoted to the analysis of augmentatives in the German-Russian parallel subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. The aim of the study is to describe the means of conveying the augmentative semantics of nouns in literary translation from Russian into German. The novelty of the study is connected with the consideration of augmentatives on the basis of professional literary translations which made it possible to find that not only German augmentatives with prefixes or affixoids serve as functional equivalents for Russian augmentatives. In fact, several types of correspondences are used, like a stylistically neutral noun without augmentative semantics or a colloquial or informal figurative noun without or in combination with an adjective with augmentative semantics, a stylistically neutral augmentative without prefixes or affixoids. Thus, the results of the study complement the existing scientific knowledge about the meanings and methods of formation of German augmentatives with information about their frequency of usage in literary translation as well as about other techniques of conveying augmentative semantics.