The Correspondence of Resultive Connectors in English and Swedish

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Conclusive English 'then' and Swedish 'då'. A corpus-based contrastive study.

Conclusive English 'then' and Swedish 'då' are compared on the basis of a bi-directional translation corpus. The examples are classified into five different uses according to certain formal and contextual criteria. The two words are shown to have obvious functional similarities: in each of the categories distinguished 'then' and 'då' are the preferred translation equivalents of each other. But there are also striking differences. Swedish 'då' is generally much more common than English 'then' and the latter is often left out in the English translations. In other words, the use of an explicit conclusion marker is more often felt to be redundant in English than in Swedish. The two words also display positional differences. For example, unlike 'then', Swedish 'då' cannot occur initially in non-declarative clauses and its use as an unstressed pragmatic particle is confined to clause-final position. Another notable feature is that an unstressed particle in the original text (in both languages) is sometimes rendered by a stressed adverb in the translation, a tendency which suggests that the distinction between stressed anaphoric adverb and unstressed discourse particle is blurred and a matter of degree rather than a clear-cut dichotomy

Concessive connectors in English and Swedish

Abstract not availabl

The generic person in English and Swedish: a contrastive study of 'one' and 'man'

To find out how the ‘generic person’ is expressed in English and Swedish, the use and correspondence of the generic pronouns one in English and man in Swedish are examined in a bidirectional English-Swedish translation corpus. The material demonstrates clearly the greater frequency and versatility of Swedish man and the restricted use of English one. The difference is partly register-related: while man is stylistically neutral one is relatively formal and often replaced by you or various other pronouns. However, the most striking difference is syntactic. The English correspondences of man cut across grammatical systems and can be seen to reflect two diverging tendencies: the English fiction texts often have a subject corresponding to Swedish man, but the non-fiction texts rely to a large extent on syntactic shifts and clause reductions without a corresponding subject. In other words, the difference between the languages is not just a matter of pronoun choice but of syntactic preferences and subject selection

Causative constructions in English and Swedish. A corpus-based contrastive study

Abstract not availabl