The underspecified connective and in a parallel TedTalk corpus: functions, translation and implicitation

Discourse markers, i.e. “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (Schiffrin 1987: 31), form a famously fuzzy category which includes formally and functionally heterogeneous expressions. Chief among them, the additive marker and, although highly frequent, encodes very little information in its core meaning. Yet, it is used in a variety of contexts where additional meanings can be identified, such as contrast or consequence. In this paper, we report on the method and findings of a multilingual corpus study focusing on the functions of and in English and its translations into Czech, French, Hungarian and Lithuanian. All occurrences of and as a discourse marker have been manually identified in a selection of TedTalks. The originals and their translations were then annotated in each language by two experts, following Crible & Degand’s (in press) functional classification. We address the following research questions: what is the functional spectrum of and in English TedTalks? How is and translated in Czech, French, Hungarian and Lithuanian? Are specific functions of and associated with specific translations? Which uses of and tend to be omitted in the translations? A pilot study has been carried out on a sample of 50 occurrences. First results point at regular tendencies regarding the implicitation, multiple translation equivalents and functional shifts of and across languages