Between and through revisited

Abstract

This paper examines the concepts of ‘throughness’ and ‘betweenness’ as they are encoded by the English prepositions through and between and their equivalents in three other languages, Norwegian, German and French. The data consist of translated texts in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. All tokens of through and between in English language original texts in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus are assigned to one of several classes according to the semantic domain of the predication. Examples of such domains are space, perception, time etc. The translations of each token are then categorised as either syntactically congruent or divergent. The congruent tokens are further divided between those employing the Norwegian prepositions gjennom and mellom, which correspond closely to through and between in their spatial senses, or alternative prepositions. Statistical tests are employed to show whether there are any significant differences between the various semantic classes in terms of translation equivalents. The results of these tests are used to propose semantic networks for both prepositions. Translations of Norwegian expressions containing the preposition mellom into English, French and German are compared to one another, and then contrasted with translations of Norwegian gjennom. Finally the results of the present investigation are compared to those of Kennedy (1991).