Additive conjunction across languages: ‘dessuten’ and its correspondences in English and French

Abstract

The present study investigates the Norwegian additive connective ‘dessuten’ and its correspondences in English and French. The investigation is based on material from parallel corpora with the language pairs Norwegian-English and Norwegian-French. Since neither English nor French has any clearly favoured counterpart to ‘dessuten’, the wide range of correspondences lends itself to a study of the semantic field of additive conjunction. The individual correspondences of ‘dessuten’ differ as regards the degree of emphasis given to the conjunction and as to the relative weighting of the conjoined segments. The position of ‘dessuten’ is found to have an impact on the choice of overt vs. zero correspondence and also on the choice of lexical correspondence. By means of the semantic mirror method a semantic map of additive conjunction, as seen from the perspective of ‘dessuten’, is outlined.