Bengt Altenberg

English corpus linguistics : studies in honour of Jan Svartvik

Part 1 Goals and methods: the state of the art in corpus linguistics, Geoffrey Leech corpus studies and probabilistic grammar, M.A.K.Halliday intuition-based and observation-based grammars, Jan Aarts. Part 2 Corpus design and development: toward a new corpus of spoken American English, Wallace L.Chafe, et al the development of the international corpus of English. Part 3 Exploration of corpora: between and through - the company they keep and the functions they serve, Graeme Kennedy a mint of phrases, Goran Kjellmer collocational frameworks in English, Antoinette Renouf and John McH.Sinclair the modals of obligation and necessity in Australian English, Peter Collins a corpus-based study of apposition in English, Charles F.Meyer syntactic evidence for semantic distinctions in English, Dieter Mindt on having a look in a corpus, Gabriele Stein and Randolph Quirk on the exploitation of computerized corpora in variation studies, Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan stylistic profiling, David Crystal expletives in the London-Lund corpus, Anna-Brita Stenstrom conversational style in British and American English - the case of backchannels, Gunnel Tottie on the history of that/zero as object clause links in English, Matti Rissanen a point of verb syntax in South-western British English - an analysis of a dialect continuum, Ossi Ihalainen. Part 4 Prospects for the future: times change, and so do corpora, Stig Johansson. Appendix: List of computer corpora.

Concessive connectors in English and Swedish

This paper compares the types and functions of English and Swedish adverbial connectors expressing concession on the basis of bidirectional translation data from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The comparison is carried out in three successive steps: first, the Swedish translation equivalents of yet are identified and analysed, next, the English equivalents of Swedish anda, and finally, the Swedish equivalents of after all, anyway and at least. The cross-linguistic correspondences established in this way involve a large number of adverbial connectors identifying the main paradigm of concessive connectors in each language. A functional analysis of the connectors reveals a symmetrical cross-linguistic pattern of concessive subtypes (labelled ’basic concession’, ’dismissal’, ’explanation’, ’topicresumption’, ’qualification’, etc) with partly overlapping sets of connectors associated with each subtype. The relationship between the subtypes is complex, but all can be seen as relating a discourse unit ’concessively’ to the preceding discourse by means of different contextually determined assumptions. This pragmatic flexibility is also reflected in the multifunctionality of many of the connectors, especially the Swedish ones.