Josep Carner and the calqued periphrastic passive in The adventures of Tom Sawyer

Abstract

Josep Carner, one of the principal Catalan writers of the 20th century, devoted a fair amount of time to translating, with the idea of introducing a new linguistic model. This article investigates whether one of the features of this model consisted in translating the English passive, more frequently than would be considered usual, as a periphrastic passive, which could be considered a stereotyped calque. To research this point, we will examine what percentage of English passives in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain appear as periphrastic passives in Carner’s Les aventures de Tom Sawyer (1918), and we will compare the results with those obtained from similar studies and from the translation by Maria Antònia Oliver of the same original (1982).