-ly adverbs in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and in two Italian translations: A corpus stylistic approach to literary translation

This paper applies a corpus stylistic approach to the study of literary translation, through the analysis of adverbs in Howard Philip Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (193l) and two Italian translations. An overabundant adverbial style has often been considered characteristic of Lovecraft's language by many critics. This analysis starts from the critics' intuition and focuses on the frequency and distribution of -ly adverbs in order examine this aspect ofLovecraft's style. In particular, this paper adopts Leech & Short's (2007 ) notion of 'deviance' and' foregrounding' to establish a link between linguistic feature and srylistic effect. The stylistic analysis of the original is also used as the starting point for the comparison of the Italian versions. The two translations are compared on the basis of their use of -mente adverbs. Differences in the use of -mente adverbs, compared to the use of -ly adverbs in the original, are shown to alter both the style of the original and the literary effect these adverbs convey in the text. The overall aim is to illustrate how corpus stylistics and the study of literary translation can interact, and at the same time to contribute to the critical srudy of Lovecraft's work and its translation.