A contrastive study of the English and Norwegian cognates from and fra

The focus of the present corpus-based investigation is to analyze the degree of mutual correspondence in bidirectional translations of the English preposition from and its Norwegian counterpart fra. Although the prepositions are cognates and have a common origin, they have developed idiosyncratic features that differ to some extent. For instance, fra, in contrast to its counterpart from, may function as part of compound words, i.e. frafall, fraværende, frata. This and other phenomena of cross-linguistic diversity in semantic mapping of the cognates from and fra are analyzed in this thesis. The present research aims to investigate potential differences between the prepositions in English and Norwegian translations on the basis of English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC). The ENPC reveals a considerable degree of non-correspondences in the translation of from and fra. The functional domains of from and fra have been contrasted in order to discover to what extent the semantic content of the prepositions overlap and to establish their co-occurrence restrictions. The data from the ENPC provides a longer list of translation correspondences for the preposition from than for fra due to the more polysemous nature of the former. This fact partly determines the higher degree of mutual correspondence in the direction of Norwegian-English than that of English-Norwegian translations. The basic hypothesis predicts that the semantic content and syntactic functions of from and fra will not coincide completely. The results of this research indicate that though the frequency of from and fra in the original texts is approximately the same, the degree of Mutual Correspondence is comparatively low (MC), i.e. 67%. The reasons for the non-correspondences lie mainly in the prepositions’ lexical and grammatical features which do not correspond across the languages. Thus, fra may operate as a part of phrasal verbs and, consequently, does not require a complement, while its English counterpart always needs a complement. Another central feature that differentiate the prepositions is amazing productivity of fra to make up compound words. This phenomenon is not common in English and from specifically does not possesses ability to take part in a word formation process. As relatively little attention has been paid to English and Norwegian prepositions in contrastive studies, and fra and from in particular, the present thesis fills a part of this gap and can hopefully contribute to a better understanding of how prepositions operate cross-linguistically. Key words: contrastive analysis, spatial, temporal and abstract meaning, trajectory and landmark, prepositional phrases, phrasal verbs, domain mapping, mutual correspondence