The aim of this study is to analyse the behaviour of Catalan connectives in a comparable corpus of literary translations (from English) and non-translations, and to account for possible differences by looking at the source texts matching the translations. Results will be examined in the light of the explicitation hypothesis, “which postulates an observed cohesive explicitness from SL to TL texts regardless of the increase traceable to differences between the two linguistic and textual systems involved” (Blum-Kulka 1986, 19). It must be noted, however, that no matter how central the notion of explicitation may be in our discussion, the present study does not purport to test out the hypothesis as such, for reasons that will be explained in the methodology section. The overall aim just formulated could then be broken down into the following partial aims: (a) to identify differences in the use of connectives between translated and non-translated Catalan literary texts; (b) to find out whether, and to what extent, such differences are sensitive to the type of semantic relation conveyed by the connectives and to specific connectives; (c) to determine to what extent such differences are due to explicitation or to other factors. In order to answer the second question, connectives expressing result/consequence and contrast/concession will be dealt with. There is a neat, one-to-one correspondence between these three partial aims and the three questions listed in the abstract. All in all, the present article intends to contribute new evidence to the ongoing debate on explicitation in general and, more particularly, on the extent to which explicitation is at play in the area of connectives.

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