COGNITIVE AND PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO TAG QUESTIONS’ INTERPRETATION IN THE CINEMA-TEXT

The peculiarities of translating tag questions from English into Russian as colloquial constructions functioning in the cinema text are proposed for consideration. The relevance of addressing one of the traditional English grammar aspects is due to the general decline in the quality (with a simultaneous increase in the quantity) of movies and TV translations, the growing tendency to literalize the meanings or unjustified linguocultural readaptation. The communicative-pragmatic approach to the tag questions analysis permits us to pay particular attention to the context, its genre-stylistic, expressive-pragmatic and cultural-communicative features. The cognitive aspect is concerned primarily with the requirement for cognitive consistency, conceptual and semantic comparability of the original and translation texts. The cinema text (in the subtitles of the movie “Paul” directed by Greg Mottola, 2011) is a variant of the literary text; and tag constructions are the non-formal speech stylization. The aim is to find an acceptable balance of grammatical, lexical-semantic, functional-stylistic and communicative-pragmatic features of tags when translated into Russian. The conducted analysis demonstrates that the linguocultural specifics of the Russian implementation of communicative strategies provided by the English tag questions make it necessary not just to translate the original text, using a spoken language, but to convey the speaker's intention in close keeping with the extra-linguistic features of the communication itself and the speaker's characterisation. The tag often does not emerge in words or constructions – translation and adaptation are performed with the help of a specific syntactic structure or intonation. However, even this strategy is not always productive because it is not so much the pragmatic attitude that can be significant but its formal and grammatical implementation.