| dc.description.abstract | This study compares and contrasts the two contrastive connectors however and imidlertid using material from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. The object is to investigate in what respects the two connectors are similar and in what respects they are different. A further aim is to compare the use of each connector in original texts and in translations to evaluate whether the target language seems to be influenced by the source language. However and imidlertid show similar frequencies in the original texts, and both are much more common in non-fiction than in fiction. While however is more frequent in the translations than in the originals, the opposite is the case for imidlertid. This may indicate that however is overused in translations from Norwegian, whereas imidlertid tends to be avoided when translating in the other direction. Imidlertid is more often translated into however (53.13%) than the other way round (18.66%). This suggests that the correspondence between them is asymmetrical, and it may in part account for the differences in frequencies between originals and translations. In translations from Norwegian, however is omitted in approximately 10% of the instances, and also added in 10% of the cases. The corresponding number for imidlertid is around 20% both for omitting and adding. In most cases, the two connectors seem to be added to make sure that the reader understands a textual relation, and omitted when the notion of contrast is clearly expressed otherwise in the text. Imidlertid almost exclusively occurs within the verb phrase or between the verb and its complement. However, on the other hand, is most frequent at the very beginning of the clause or in the position after the first obligatory clause element (in the originals) or after a non-obligatory element (in the translations). In the great majority of the occurrences the position is changed in translation, complying with the syntactic norms of the target language. Imidlertid is mainly concessive (i.e. expressing that an event is unexpected in the light of another). Only 8% of its occurrences in the Norwegian original texts were analysed as adversative (i.e. simply expressing that there is a difference between two comparable items). The adversative use of however is more frequent than that of imidlertid, accounting for 29% of the occurrences in the English originals. In translated texts, the number of adversative however is lower (15.1%), while that of imidlertid is higher (14%). | eng |