Coordination, discourse relations, and information packaging – cross-linguistic differences 1 Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen i , Wiebke Ramm ii , Kåre Solfjeld iii & Bergljot Behrens iv i Dept. of Literature, Area Studies and Eurpean Languages, Univ. of Oslo, Norway ii Dept. of Literature, Area Studies and Eurpean Languages, Univ. of Oslo, Norway iii Østfold University College, Halden, Norway iv Dept. of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, Univ. of Oslo, Norway Abstract: Taking non-correspondences regarding coordinated constructions in translation as a starting point, we discuss the interpretation of coordinated structures as compared to non- coordinated alternatives. We show that Norwegian tends to exploit coordination somewhat differently than English or German, and point at some interesting theoretical implications with respect to discourse structure and discourse relations. 1. Introduction Coordinated constructions are common in virtually every language of the world. However, there is no guarantee that in translation coordination in the source language (SL) always corresponds to coordination in the target language (TL), or that TL coordination always has coordination as its SL counterpart. Viewing coordination as a specific means of information packaging which, in spite of its apparent syntactic symmetry (the conjuncts belonging to the same syntactic category), may often be understood as encoding or ‘explicating’ an asymmetrical relation at the semantic-pragmatic level, we are going to investigate examples of translation mismatches involving coordinated constructions in Norwegian (both as SL and TL). Using corpus data from different translation constellations between Norwegian, German and English, we will be concerned with two types of translation discrepancy, namely (i) SL coordinated clauses translated as a sequence of sentences in the TL (section 2.1.), and (ii) SL syntactic subordination (adjunction) rendered as (VP or clausal) coordination in the TL (sections 2.2. and 2.3.). The data are taken from three different parallel corpora, the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC) 2 , as well as two smaller corpora of non-fictional texts. We shall argue that the Norwegian conjunction og, while being semantically equivalent to English and and German und, is exploited somewhat differently in discourse. Thus, coordination seems to be possible in Norwegian in cases where it would be problematic in German; and it may be used without further discourse markers in cases where an explicit discourse marker is strongly preferred in German (2.3.). Coordination may also be used to compensate for syntactic subordination in German and English (2.2. and 2.3.), licensing the inference of certain discourse relations to hold between the conjuncts while blocking possible interpretations arising from non-coordinated sentence alternatives (cf. discussion of coordinated vs. ‘full stop sentences’ in Blakemore (1987, 2002). Our hypothesis is that such differences reflect language-specific strategies of information packaging, supporting the claim 1 This research is being carried out within the project SPRIK (Språk i kontrast / Languages in Contrast) at the University of Oslo, Faculty of the Humanities. The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council under project number 158447/530 (2003-2006). Project webpage: http://www.hf.uio.no/forskningsprosjekter/sprik/english/index.html . Wiebke Ramm holds a PhD scholarship from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo. 2 See http://www.hf.uio.no/forskningsprosjekter/sprik/english/corpus/index.html