Finnish particle ihan and its Czech translation courterparts

In Finnish, there is a large number of particles used to intensify or otherwise modify the meaning of adjective phrases or adverb phrases. In our presentation, we shall discuss the Finnish particle ihan and its translation courterparts in Czech. The particle ihan is very common in both speech and writing. In addition, it is interesting as a research object in the sense that it has several meanings, which are sometimes difficult to describe exactly. In our presentation, we shall firstly discuss three meanings of the word ihan: (1) the particle is used to indicate the extremity of a scalar property (ihan pieni 'extremely small'), (2) the particle is used to express what is sufficient in a given context (ihan hyvä 'sufficiently good'), and (3) the particle is used to intensify an extreme, even exaggerated property (ihan valtava 'just enormous'). The different meanings of the particle seem to have something in common: they are associated with extremities and borders and, in addition, they are related to interpersonal aspects of language use. In our presentation, we shall also focus on how the Finnish particle is translated into Czech.  

To identify the most appropriate Czech translation counterparts, we use a parallel corpus that contains Finnish-Czech translations, specifically InterCorp v16ud Finnish – Czech, which is freely available on the official website www.korpus.cz. The corpus-based approach provides a systematic and methodologically grounded way to examine how ihan is rendered in Czech and to determine whether certain Czech expressions consistently correspond to the various meanings of ihan mentioned above. By conducting a detailed analysis of the translated texts, we seek to establish whether ihan has a single, direct counterpart in Czech or whether its functions are distributed across multiple different lexical and grammatical means of expression. Special attention is devoted to lexical items such as zcela (‘entirely’), docela (‘quite’), naprosto (‘absolutely’), úplně (‘completely’), and celkem (‘fairly’), as these expressions largely correspond to different nuanced meanings of ihan and are therefore frequent translation counterparts. However, in a significant number of cases, an alternative solution emerges in which the counterpart of ihan in Czech is entirely omitted, and its semantic feature is instead reflected in the selection of surrounding lexical units within the context. One of the key objectives of this study is to systematically map and analyze which of the semantic types of ihan tend to favor translation with a direct lexically similar equivalent and which, on the contrary, tend to be omitted in the Czech text or replaced by other linguistic means.