The Correspondence of Resultive Connectors in English and Swedish

Causality plays a fundamental role in human thought and communication (see e.g. Couper-Kuhlen and Kortmann 2000). As a result, expressions of causal relations are an important and common feature in most languages, in spoken as well as written discourse. Broadly speaking, a causal relation can be described as a relationship between a ‘cause’ and an ‘effect’. When the relation is obvious or inferable from the context, it does not have to be overtly expressed:

Both (1) and ( 2) are examples of objective causal relations reflecting circumstances over which the subject has no control (also called 'semantic' or 'content' relations).But causality can also involve varying degrees of subjectivity (see Pander Maat and Sanders 2000) as in (3) where the second clause expresses an intentional action and the first the reason for this action: (3) John wanted to study, so he didn't go to the party That (3) differs from ( 2) is shown by the fact that so can be replaced by as a result in (2) but less naturally in (3).
In the real world the cause always precedes the effect in time, but in discourse the order of presentation varies.For example, in (1) -( 3) the sequence of cause and effect parallels that of the real world (iconic word order), but in (4) the effect is presented before the cause (effect-cause order): various clause-integrated expressions (e.g. the result is, that's (the reason) why).2The choice of expression depends on a variety of factors, such as the semantic or pragmatic nature of the relationship, the sequence and grammatical realization of the causal units, and the style and register of the discourse.Languages tend to differ in their repertoire of connectors as well as in their readiness to signal causal relationships explicitly (see e.g.Mauranen 1993 andFabricius-Hansen 2005).Although some research has been devoted to the use of causal connectors in individual languages, especially English, little is known about the cross-linguistic correspondences of causal connectors in different languages.Contrastive studies based on translation corpora are excellently suited to increase our knowledge in this respect.Such studies can identify the set of connectors that are available in the languages compared, how the connectors are used in real texts, and the cross-linguistic correspondence between them.
In this study I will briefly examine the correspondence of adverbial causal connectors in English and Swedish on the basis of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (see below).Since these connectors typically occur in clauses expressing the 'result' (effect, consequence or conclusion) of a preceding 'cause', I will follow Quirk et al. (1985: 634 ff.) and Biber et al. (1999: 877 ff.) and call them 'resultive' connectors.
The study is preliminary and mainly intended to demonstrate an approach that I have found useful as a first step in a cross-linguistic comparison of linguistic expressions in a bi-directional translation corpus.The approach is useful in that it provides a revealing picture of the main paradigms, or sets of expressions, that are used to express a certain 'meaning' in the languages compared and the degree of correspondence between the expressions involved (see Altenberg 1999).Once these have been established, it is possible to examine the correspondences in greater detail and describe the factors determining the choice of expression in the two languages.

Material and method
The starting-point of the study is an inventory of connectors expressing 'result', 'inference' and 'conclusion' in the two languages, mainly drawn from Quirk et al. (1985) for English, and Teleman et al. (1999) for Swedish.The following connectors were included: English: accordingly, as a result, as a consequence, because of this/that, consequently, for this/that reason, hence, in consequence, in that case, so, that's why, then, therefore, thus.Swedish: alltså 'so', då 'then', därför 'therefore', det är/var därför (som) 'it is/was therefore (that)', följaktligen 'consequently', följdriktigt 'as a result', för den skull 'because of that', i och med detta '(in and) with this', i så fall 'in that case', på grund av detta 'because of this', så 'so', således 'thus', sålunda 'thus'.
The great majority of these are adverbial connectors but there are two exceptions.English so is a 'semi-coordinator' (see Quirk et al. 1985: 928) and its cognate Swedish counterpart så is clearly a coordinator (see Teleman et al. 1999Teleman et al. : 2730).That's why is a so-called 'reversed wh-cleft' (or pseudo-cleft) construction (see Quirk et al. 1885.It is a variable grammatical construction but has been judged sufficiently common and conventionalized to be included as a resultive 'connector'.Swedish has no structural counterpart, but the near-equivalent det-cleft construction det är/var därför (som) 'it is/was therefore (that)', corresponding to an English it-cleft construction, was included for comparison.3As Mats Johansson (2002) has demonstrated, English reversed wh-clefts and 3Both the English and Swedish clefts are grammatically variable constructions: they can be inflected for tense and be modulated in terms of polarity and modality and they permit adverbial modification.The subject of the English wh-cleft is either the demonstrative pronoun that or this or relative which.For practical reasons I will just use their most common forms that's why and det är det (som) here.
Swedish det-clefts are often treated as functionally equivalent.As we shall see, both types are common as resultive markers in the material, in the original texts as well as in the translations.
In should be added that some of the examined connectors are anaphoric or deictic in character (e.g.English because of this/that, for this/that reason, in that case, that's why, then and Swedish då, därför, i så fall, på grund av detta), referring back to a cause, reason or circumstance in the preceding discourse.They might therefore be regarded as 'causal' rather than 'resultive' connectors.4However, like the other connectors they occur in resultive clauses and contribute to our interpretation of these clauses as the 'result', 'consequence' or 'conclusion' of a preceding circumstance.Hence, no distinction has been made between them and non-anaphoric connectors in the inventory of connective items, but the anaphoric nature of some connectors will be considered when it seems to affect the choice of translation.
The resultive use of these connectors was examined in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC).This corpus consists of a wide range of text samples from original English and Swedish sources and their translations into the other language.Both fiction and non-fiction texts are represented in the corpus.The original English and Swedish texts have been matched as far as possible in terms of text type and purpose and the corpus can therefore be used both as a comparable corpus and as a translation corpus (on the advantages of this, see Johansson 1998 andAltenberg andAijmer 2000).The total size of the corpus (including original texts and translations from both languages) is over 2,8 million words.For a 4 Teleman et al. (1999: 4.150 ff.) make a distinction between 'conjunctional' sentence adverbials (e.g. alltså, då, följaktligen, följdriktigt, således, sålunda) and what they call 'free' anaphoric adverbials expressing cause and condition (e.g.därför, fördenskull, i så fall, på grund av detta) but admit that the borderline between the two types is unclear since both can express a logical relation to a preceding clause.One characteristic feature of 'free' adverbials is that they can be the focus of cleft constructions, be negated and questioned (cf.Quirk et al. 1985: 4, 145, 151) but this criterion, too, is not infallible (i så fall, for example, cannot be the focus of a cleft construction).
detailed description of the corpus, including an explanation of the text codes used in this paper, see Altenberg et al. (2001).

Distribution of connectors in the original texts
Altogether fourteen English and thirteen Swedish connectors were examined in the corpus.Their distribution in the English and Swedish original texts is shown in Tables 1 and 2.5 As we see, the frequency of the individual connectors varies greatly and both languages rely rather heavily on a restricted number of connectors.
Only six English and nine Swedish connectors occur more than 10 times in the material and the four most common connectors in each language account for nearly 90% of the examples in the corpus.Many of the connectors also differ markedly in frequency in the two main text categories of the corpus.Among the English connectors, so and then are especially common in the fiction texts, while most of the other connectors are more common in the non-fiction texts.The Swedish connectors also tend to be stylistically biased, though not to the same extent.While då, alltså, så, det är därför (som) och i så fall are especially common in the fiction texts, most of the other connectors have a greater frequency in the non-fiction texts.These stylistic differences reflect the greater formality of the non-fiction texts and the incidence of dialogue in the fiction texts.As we shall see, this stylistic differentiation of the connectors also affects their degree of correspondence in the two languages.
Another striking difference demonstrated in Tables 1 and 2 is that the Swedish connectors are on the whole much more frequent than the English ones in both text categories.This suggests that the Swedish writers tend to be more generous in signalling causal relations in discourse.And since explicit marking of the relationship between utterances can be seen as serving to facilitate the listener's/reader's interpretation of discourse (cf.Blakemore 1992: 136 ff.), Swedish appears to be more listener/reader-oriented than English in this respect (cf.Altenberg 1999).However, it is difficult to tell if this reflects a general cultural difference or whether it is restricted to a particular category or set of connectors.I will return to this question in section 6.

Mutual correspondence
Let us now turn to the translation of the English and Swedish connectors and their cross-linguistic correspondence.Since each of the connectors can be rendered in a number of ways in the other language, a fruitful first step is to use the translations to estimate the 'mutual correspondence' of the different connectors in the two languages.This will give us an idea of the degree of functional similarity of the English and Swedish connectors and a starting-point for a closer look at their individual characteristics.
'Mutual correspondence' (MC) is a simple statistical measure of the frequency with which a pair of items from two languages are translated into each other in a bi-directional translation corpus (see Altenberg 1999).This can be calculated and expressed as a percentage by means of the formula where A t and B t are the frequencies of the compared items in the translations, and A s and B s their frequencies in the sources texts.The value will range from 0 (no correspondence) to 100 (full correspondence).To take an example, if English therefore is always rendered by därför in the Swedish translations and därför always rendered by therefore in the English translations, the MC value will be 100%.If they are never translated into each other, the value will be 0%.
To establish the cross-linguistic correspondence of the English and Swedish resultive connectors in the corpus, the MC values of all connectors occurring at least 10 times in the original texts were calculated.The pairs with the highest and lowest values are shown in Table 3.To indicate any bias in the direction of the translation, columns two and three also give the unidirectional tendencies, i.e. the tendency of the English connector to be translated into its Swedish counterpart (Eng > Swe) and of the Swedish connector to be translated into its English counterpart (Swe > Eng).There are several possible reasons for these low figures.For example, we cannot expect all resultive connectors in one of the languages to be functionally and stylistically equivalent to all the connectors in the other.Generally, a connector in one language has several possible translations in the other language.The use of competing alternatives of this kind will automatically reduce the MC values.Moreover, there may be partial functional overlap between connectors in the two languages.For example, that's why and det är därför (som) are functionally equivalent in some respects (e.g. both refer anaphorically to a given cause and the result is often presupposed) but they are syntactically different and not always perfect translation equivalents (see section 5).There are also stylistic differences between many of the connectors.An obvious example is the cognate pair therefore and därför.While därför is style-neutral, therefore is mainly restricted to formal contexts.This difference is clearly demonstrated in Table 1 which shows that therefore is much less common in the English fiction texts than in the non-fiction texts.The difference also gives rise to a clear translation bias, demonstrated in Table 3.While English therefore is readily translated by Swedish därför (76.9%), translations in the opposite direction are much less common (49.6%) and mainly restricted to the non-fiction texts (cf.Altenberg 1999).In the fiction texts so and that's why are generally the preferred translations.
Finally, a causal relation that is signalled by a connector in a source text may not be regarded as needing explicit marking in the translation.As a result, the connector is omitted and we have what is often called a 'zero translation'.This tendency will be further examined in section 6.
Although the scale of MC values in Table 3 is revealing, it is instructive to use the values more systematically and treat them as indicators of cross-linguistic connector 'paradigms'.In Table 4 the most common connectors have been grouped in a matrix in such a way that items with a comparatively high MC value appear closely together, vertically and/or horizontally.As a result, groups of connectors that seem to be related, cross-linguistically and language-internally, are highlighted (shaded in the figure).For example, Swedish därför can be seen to correspond not only to English therefore (as might be expected) but also, though less strongly, to that's why and so.Similarly, English so does not only correspond to Swedish så but also to some extent to därför and alltså, and the latter in turn also corresponds to English thus, and so on.What emerges from the figure are what might be called 'paradigmatic subsets' in the two languages, containing functionally similar connectors, some of which may be regarded as core items (and prototypical translation equivalents) and some less common alternatives.These cross-linguistic paradigms are seen more clearly in Figure 1, where the paradigms and their subsets are presented in parallel columns and linked by lines representing the degree of MC of the different connector pairs.7 7The width of the connecting lines is a rough attempt to represent the degree of MC of the connector pairs.Thus, the thickest line represents an MC of over 50%, a line of medium thickness an MC of 20-49%, a thin unbroken line an MC of 10-19%, and a broken line an MC of 5-9%.
English Swedish The cross-linguistic paradigms that emerge from this figure seem to consist of five subsets, each characterized by a pair of core items with a comparatively strong MC accompanied by one or more secondary alternatives with weaker correspondences to one or both of the core items.However, the subsets are not quite distinct: all of them are weakly related to some other subset, and the 'middle' subset (with so and så as core items) appears to be rather complex and heterogeneous.It should be emphasized that the subsets are just quantitative clusterings reflecting the preferred translations of the English and Swedish connectors in the corpus.To what extent the five subsets also represent functionally distinct categories, and how they are related to the functional uses outlined in examples ( 1) -( 7) in the Introduction, can only be determined through a close analysis of the examples.8This will be not done here.Instead I will 8 Interesting attempts to account for the choice of connector in terms of subjectivity, or rather, the distance between the speaker and the 'subject of consciousness' responsible for the causal relation, have been made by Pander Maat and take a closer look at the cleft constructions at the top of MC scale and then return to the issue of zero translations (omission) touched on above.

English wh-clefts and Swedish det-clefts
As we have seen, English reversed wh-clefts and Swedish det-clefts have the highest MC value of all the resultive connectors in the corpus.Strictly speaking, they are not of course adverbial connectors but syntactic constructions with a connective function that is similar to that of the adverbial connectors, linking a discourse unit expressing 'result' to the preceding discourse.The fact that Swedish därför is part of a det-cleft (corresponding to an English it-cleft) reflects a clear syntactic difference between the cognate adverbs therefore and därför: while the cleft use of therefore is obsolete and rare in English, Swedish därför can readily be the focus a det-cleft construction.In other words, därför is more clauseintegrated and functions more like an adjunct than therefore.9Conversely, Swedish cannot form reversed wh-clefts with a relative adverb as wh-word.However, as we shall see, there is a functionally similar Swedish construction in which the complement consists of a resultive support noun followed by a preposition and a nominal clause: detta är anledningen till att… (lit.'this is the reason for that…').Tables 5 and 6 show the translations of the Swedish det-clefts and the English wh-clefts.Sanders (2000) for Dutch resultive connectors and by Mol (2004) in a comparison of English and Norwegian connectors.9However, as Teleman et al. (1999: 4.151) point out, därför cannot be the focus of a cleft construction when the cleft clause expresses an indirect conclusion, i.e. when the causal relation is pragmatic rather than semantic: Det lyste i fönstren.?Det var därför de nog var hemma.As Table 5 shows, the great majority of the Swedish det-clefts are translated by an English reversed wh-cleft construction of the type that's why: (8) -Lyktan slocknade, sa han.Det var därför jag dröjde.(ARP1) "My lamp went out," he said."That's why I've been so long.
The close correspondence between Swedish det-clefts with a focused anaphoric adverb and English reversed wh-clefts has been demonstrated by M. Johansson (2002).What these constructions have in common are their strong identifying character and cohesive effect: both emphasize the existence of a specific (exclusive and exhaustive) reason for the result expressed in the cleft clause and in both the reason is identifiable by means of an anaphoric element, viz.därför in the Swedish construction and the demonstrative subject in the English construction.Since the re-sult clause is normally presupposed, what is asserted and emphasized is that the reason can be found in the preceding context.The reason is either overtly expressed in the previous clause, as in ( 8), or inferable from the immediate context: When the reference of därför is more 'global', comprising an extended stretch of discourse, the construction tends to have a summarizing rhetorical effect: (10) Nu kan strukturpolitiken, rätt utformad, skapa bättre förutsättningar för EU och dess invånare.Det märkliga är då att strukturreformer som inte kostar verkar vara svårare att anta än budgetsanering -förmodligen för att man utmanar starka särintressen.Det är därför som jag vill gratulera kommissionen till ett modigt dokument, i vilket vikten av reformerade och bättre fungerande arbetsmarknader diskuteras.(ECAR1) Now a correctly designed structural policy can create better conditions for the EU and its inhabitants.The remarkable thing is that structural reforms which cost nothing appear to be more difficult to accept than budget reorganization, probably because they challenge strong special interests.That is why I would like to congratulate the Commissioner on a courageous document which discusses the importance of reformed labour markets which work better.( 9 "Going to the police would be like accepting that something awful had happened," Robert Åkerblom went on."That's why I didn't dare." While English wh-clefts are used as translations of Swedish det-clefts in 82.2% of the cases, the reverse translation of English wh-clefts into Swedish det-clefts is less common (66.7%).However, as Table 6 shows, most of the alternative renderings are either functionally equivalent to English wh-clefts: detta/vilket är/var skälet/anledningen/orsaken till att… (lit.'this/which is/was the reason for that…'), or a regular det-cleft with a noun denoting reason in focus: det är av detta skäl som…'it is for this reason that…'.If these variants are included as Swedish translation equivalents of the English wh-cleft, the mutual correspondence of the English and Swedish constructions rises to 83.3%.This underlines the functional similarity of these constructions and their distinctive position in the cross-linguistic paradigms of resultive connectives in the two languages.10

Zero translations
Since omission of a causal connector in the target language is likely to affect the degree of cross-linguistic correspondence, it deserves to be examined further.Two questions will be briefly touched on here.Is omission a uniform tendency that affects the translation of all connectors to the same extent?Is it independent of the direction of translation?To explore this, the zero translations of the most common connectors in the two languages were recorded and compared.The tendencies are shown in Table 7 and 8.11 We see that in both languages some connectors tend to produce more zero translations than others.Among the English connectors, thus, then and so are left untranslated in more than 10% of the examples, while that's why is always translated in some way.Although zero translations occur in both directions of translation and seem to affect certain connectors more than others, especially those indicating a logical consequence or conclusion, the tendency is much stronger in the English translations.There seems to be an instinctive feeling among the English translators that causal relationships of these kinds do not need explicit marking by a connector if the context is clear enough.If this reflects a real cultural difference between English and Swedish discourse, we should also expect Swedish resultive connectors to be more frequent in the Swedish translations than in the English source texts.Or more precisely, we should expect connectors to turn up in the Swedish translations in examples where the English source text has no connector.This has not been tested systematically here, but to explore the possibility a small study was made of the English sources of the connector alltså in the Swedish translations in the corpus.The result is shown in Table 9: Alltså typically indicates a conclusion or logical consequence.In ( 16) the consequence expressed in the last sentence is evidently obvious enough to be left unmarked in the English original but is marked in the Swedish translation.In (17) the conclusion in the final utterance is signalled once in both the source text (then) and the translation (då).But the Swedish translator has also added alltså, which suggests that the conclusion is the result of objective logical reasoning.As a result, the tenative nature of the original is lost.13This small study, then, together with the much higher frequency of English zero translations of Swedish resultive connectors, strongly indicates a more liberal use of resultive connectors in the Swedish texts.If we add to this the generally higher frequency of resultive connectors in the Swedish original texts observed in section 3, it seems safe to conclude that there is a cultural difference in the use of these connectors: while causal relationships are often left unmarked in English texts, they tend to be signalled explicitly by a connector to a greater extent in Swedish texts. 14There are indications that this difference is especially strong 13 On the historical development of alltså and its uses in Swedish, see Lehti-Eklund (1989) and(1990).On the use of Norwegian da and altså in Norwegian, which is very similar to their use in Swedish, see Fretheim (2000).14 In a study of English and Norwegian correspondences of the German connectives dabei and wieder in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus, Fabricius-Hansen (2005) shows that similar differences in marking conventions exist across these languages.While German, and to a lesser extent Norwegian, tends to favour explicit marking, English often leaves discourse relations unmarked.These tendencies are dependent on the semantics of the connectives and on structural and contextual considerations, but the study confirms the existence of different cultural conventions in the marking of discourse relations.
in clauses denoting a logical consequence or conclusion, but this possibility has not been examined in detail here and requires further study.15

Conclusion
Calculating the mutual correspondence of a set of items in two languages on the basis of a bi-directional translation corpus is a fruitful beginning of a contrastive study.The approach makes it possible not only to estimate the degree of correspondence between the items but also to establish cross-linguistic paradigms which allow us to see more clearly the relationship between the items, across and within the compared languages.
In this study I have provided a sketch of the cross-linguistic paradigms of resultive connectors in English and Swedish.I have also looked more closely at a pair of resultive connectors with a high degree of correspondence, English wh-clefts and Swedish det-clefts, and indicated their special role in the cross-linguistic paradigms.In addition, I have briefly examined the zero translations of the resultive connectors in the corpus and linked the greater tendency of connector omission in the English translations to the overall greater frequency of connectors in the Swedish texts.Both tendencies suggest a cultural difference in the marking of causal relationships in discourse, manifested in a more generous explicit marking in the Swedish texts.
The main purpose of the paper has been to demonstrate the usefulness of an approach in corpus-based contrastive analysis.No attempt has been made to analyse the functional differences between the connectors in any detail or the factors determining the choice between the available 15In Altenberg (1999) inferential connectors were found to have a lower MC than resultive connectors and also a greater tendency to be omitted in translations.However, no distinction has been made between inferential and resultive connectors here and it is difficult to compare the results.

Table 1 .
Resultive connectors in the English original texts

Table 2 .
Resultive connectors in the Swedish original texts

Table 3 .
Mutual correspondence of English and Swedish resultive connectors As shown in the table, the MC values of the various pairs describe a cline from 76.6% to 0%.6Only ten pairs reach 10% and only four exceed 50%.On the whole, the values are surprisingly low.Only the topmost pair, that's why : det är därför (som), has a relatively high MC value, while the following three pairs, so : så, therefore : därför, then : då, which are all cognates and closely related in meaning, are used as translations of each other in little more than half of the examples in the corpus.The remaining pairs either have a low MC value or never correspond at all.6The pairs at the bottom of the table with a MC value of 0 only represent a selection of the large number of connectors that are never translated into each other.

Table 4 .
Mutual correspondence of the most common English and Swedish connectors

Table 6 .
Swedish translations of 'that's why'

Table 7 .
Swedish zero translations of English connectors

Table 8 .
English zero translations of Swedish connectors The English translations of the Swedish connectors also present a variable picture, but zero translations are on the whole much more common.No less than six of the connectors are left untranslated in more than 10% of the examples, and in four cases-alltså, då, således and sålunda-omission occurs in about a third of the examples.12On the whole, omission is nearly twice as common in translations from Swedish into English as in the opposite direction.Some typical examples of English zero translations are:

Table 9 .
English sources of Swedish alltsåThe table shows that, although most of the Swedish examples of alltså have a corresponding English connector as their origin (notably so and thus), nearly a third of the cases (27.2%) turn up 'out of the blue', i.e. without a corresponding source in the English texts.Two examples will suffice to illustrate this: