Demonstratives in Contrast

Abstract

Demonstratives are referring expressions that exist in all languages. English and Norwegian are no exceptions to this rule. Their demonstrative systems are similar in both form and meaning. Perhaps due to their similarities, few comprehensive contrastive analyses have been made between the two languages, if any at all. This in-depth contrastive study uses a parallel corpus (the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus) in order to explore incongruent translations of demonstrative determiners in sentence pairs. By doing so, it hopes to contribute to an understanding of the similarities and differences between the English and Norwegian demonstrative systems. The Givenness Hierarchy will be used as a cognitive framework against which the use of the demonstratives in the two languages will be compared and discussed. While demonstratives comprise pronouns as well as locational adverbs such as here and there alongside determiners of co-occurring nouns, a study of all the categories go beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead, the present study concentrates on developing an in-depth contrastive understanding of the similarities and differences between the two languages’ use of demonstrative determiners.