Käännös avaimena sanan harva semantiikkaan
Translation as a key to the semantics of the word harva

Summary/Abstract: 2is study examines the Finnish word harva ’sparse, thin, infrequent, few’ and its semantics from the perspective of cognitive grammar, which considers the meanings of linguistic units with regards to the mental images and relationships they represent. 2e word harva is used in various ways, especially in written Finnish. 2e focus is on its use as a pronominal quanti!er and adjective. 2e study aims to compare the occurrences of harva as a quanti!er and as an adjective with similar Russian linguistic units through translated texts. 2e research highlights the importance of context, norms, and cognitive processes in translation. 2is corpus-based translation study is positioned within the !eld of comparative linguistics. 2e analysis focuses on qualitative research, allowing for an in-depth, detailed, and comprehensive examination of the phenomenon. 2e primary data source is the ParRus parallel corpus, created at the University of Tampere in 1999, which includes original Russian texts and their Finnish translations. 2e results show that the closest Russian equivalent to harva is the adjective redkij, which is polysemous and can describe quantity, rarity, physical properties, and frequency. 2is study indicates that the meaning of the quanti!er harva also depends on the entities it quanti!es. 2e quanti!er harva can quantify the number of people, emphasizing their exceptional nature or describing abstract qualities. When referring to periods, harva indicates frequency, referring to something that happens rarely. Parallel texts help understand such conventionalized units, including ani harva, which emphasizes falling below the norm. Both the quanti!er and adjective harva re3ect insu4ciency, with the norm for the adjective tied to the described entity and the quanti!er’s norm being more context dependent. 2e study used parallel texts to examine the polysemy of the word harva as both an adjective and a quanti!er. It addressed the gap in research on adjective polysemy, showing relationships between word classes. Translation pairs represented a wide range of semantic properties analyzed from the perspective of cognitive grammar.

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