Connectors in a cross-linguistic perspective

This article addresses two main questions: Can connectors be properly translated and can ‘contrastive network analysis’ be used both as a heuristic tool and for language-specific analyses? My key example being the French connector donc, I first propose a description of this connector within the framework of ‘connector grammar’. Based on a study of professional translations of donc into a number of languages, I then show that it is bound by instructions to a particular ‘function domain’ which is probably used intuitively by translators, and I proceed to discuss how function domains may be circumscribed. Network analysis may be used to this end, and I show the results of a recent experiment involving this method. These results turn out to raise a new series of problems, and I consider the possibility of resolving some of these by a combination of network analysis and Dyvik’s (1998 a and b) ‘semantic mirrors’ analysis.