Le verbe "devoir" et ses trois équivalents polonais: "musieć", "mieć", "powinien"

Abstract

The construction with the French verb devoir + infinitive is generally translated into Polish by means of the verbs musieć, mieć, powinien. The author analyzes the conditions of the use of these verbs in a corpus of Polish translations of literary texts taking into consideration the tense and form of the original French sentence. Musieć expresses obligation and necessity more categorically than mieć and powinien, however, in the past tense it may appear only if the action indicated by the infinitive was carried out. Powinien denotes recommendation or reproach (especially in the translation of the conditional contexts), whereas mieć indicates the intention of the subject, as well as, in the past tense, a future action shown from a past point of view. All the three verbs can have epistemic use, musieć being most frequently employed to indicate strong probability.