On Monday 3 December 2001, 4.30 pm, Professor Thorstein Fretheim (NTNU,
Trondheim, Norway & Clare Hall, University of Cambridge) will be giving a
talk at the University of Hertfordshire entitled:
A Constrastive Look at Concessive Relations in English and Norwegian
SYNOPSIS
A concessive relation between two propositions P and Q obtains whenever P
and Q are both true but the communicator makes it mutually manifest to the
two communicating parties that she attributes to herself in the past, or to
the addressee, or to a third person, or to people in general, a belief that
the truth of P would rather cause the contradiction of Q to be true. This
can be achieved simply by means of a juxtaposition of declarative sentences
plus contextual information, as in (a), or a conjunction of sentences
linked by means of but, as in (b), or it can be achieved by means of
concessive markers that are specialised for the encoding of a concessive
relation between propositions (and between the states of affairs that they
represent), as in (c)-(e).
(a) He had £100. That was not enough to take him to Tashkent and back.
(b) He had £100, but that was not enough to take him to Tashkent and back.
(c) Although he had £100, that was not enough to take him to Tashkent and
back.
(d) He had £100. Still that was not enough to take him to Tashkent and back.
(e) He had £100, though that was not enough to take him to Tashkent and back.
The present talk makes a comparison between some specific ways of marking
concessivity in English and in Norwegian. One lexical entry in Norwegian,
the adverb likevel (literally: equally well), covers the whole range of
uses which English captures by using a variety of concessive markers like
nevertheless, still, yet, even so, all the same, anyway, after all. It is
shown how the relative sparsity of lexicalised concessive adverbials in
Norwegian is compensated for by the speaker's choice of word order and
prosody. Another lexicalised concessive marker in Norwegian is for det
(literally: for that), which deserves special attention because it seems to
refute the standard belief that concessives always take scope over
negation. The third and last item to be discussed is the Norwegian
concessive adverb riktignok (literally: true enough), for which there is no
counterpart in the English lexicon. What is special about the configuration
'Riktignok P, but Q' (or, more frequently 'Riktignok P, but not Q') is that
the truth of Q entails the truth of P, and that Q is often not expressed
overtly but has to be inferred on the basis of contextual information.
You are very welcome to attend this talk. If you want to attend, please
let me know, so that I can send you directions.
Best wishes,
Marjolein Groefsema
___________________________________________________________________________
Dr Marjolein Groefsema
Acting Associate Head of Department (Academic)
Subject Leader for Linguistics Email: M.Groefsema@herts.ac.uk
Department of Humanities Tel. +1707 285699
University of Hertfordshire Fax: +1707 285616
Watford Campus
Aldenham
Herts.
WD2 8AT
UK
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