A Study on Expressions of Possibility and the Related Meanings in Japanese and English through the comparison of parallel text data from novels

The purpose of this study is to find out how Japanese and English perceive the concept of “possibility” and its related meanings, through the comparison of parallel texts collected from novels and their translations in the two languages. The data is collected from two novels; one is a Japanese novel and its translation in English, the other is an English novel and its translation in Japanese. Target forms are Japanese “-(r)areru”, “-eru”, “-dekiru”, “kotogadekiru” and English “can” and “could”. From the data, 743 parallel clauses in which the target forms were used were collected. Observations on the collected examples in each language revealed that Japanese perceives possibility as stative rather than dynamic and tends to express it as a description of a state of a situation. On the other hand, possibility in English is essentially “unreal” and perceived as conditional. These tendencies are related to the fact that Japanese prefers subjective construal whereas English prefers objective construal