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 and (a) over circle, 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', 'topic-resumption', '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.