Elusive Connectives. A Case Study on the Explicitness Dimension of Discourse Coherence

The present article is an explorative study concerned with the elusiveness of certain connectives (discourse particles), intralinguistically and across languages: the fact that one and the same connective may seem redundant in one context but indispensable in another context; and that a connective may tend to appear in one language under conditions where no explicit connective device is used in some other language. More specifically, the article deals with the German particles (adverbs) wieder ‘again’ and dabei, lit. ‘thereby’ and their glosses in English and Norwegian, which are studied across a corpus of text samples and sentence-aligned translations in German, English, and Norwegian (the Oslo Mulitlingual Corpus). The two first sections present a preliminary outline of the problem and the method to be used, along with some terminological clarification. Each of the following two main sections briefly outlines the semantics of one German particle, presents data from the corpus showing that it remarkably often has no explicit translational image in English or Norwegian, and ends by discussing characteristic cases and general tendencies to be derived from the data of comparison. The final section (Section 5) summarizes the findings and proposes provisional conclusions pointing towards bidirectional optimality theory as a fruitful theoretical background for further research in this area.