The research project “ Dutch MPs in English translation” aims to investigate how MPs in Dutch are translated into English. This is an interesting research question since MPs are predominantly present in Dutch but underrepresented in English. However, in order to describe the behaviour of these MPs in a translation corpus (Dutch-English and English-Dutch), a motivated account of their meaning in different contexts is required.

In the case of Dutch MP wel, a thorough investigation of the literature on wel (Abraham 1984; Westheide 1985; Hogeweg 2008) demonstrates that there is no consensus on how these contexts should be grouped according to the different functions of MP wel. Because of the similarities of the meaning of German wohl and Dutch wel, some of the literature on wohl, (Asbach-Schnitker 1977; Zimmermann 2007) has also been taken into account.

This contribution aims to propose a description of MP wel in Dutch, on the basis of a translation method (Aijmer, Foolen et al. 2006) which is used to analyse the instances of this MP found in a translation corpus DU-EN and EN-DU. The framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld and Lachlan Mackenzie 2008) combined with notions from Procedural Functional Grammar (Nuyts 1992; Nuyts 2001) offers a useful basis for a category-internal classification of MP wel.

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