Abstract
The aim of the paper is to compare the use of the cleft construction in English and Norwegian from the point of view their discourse functions. Previous comparative studies of this kind analysed either direct translations between the two languages (Gundel 2002) or combined direct translations with the analysis of original texts (English-Swedish clefts, Johansson 2001).
However, as these methods have some drawbacks (interference in the case of translation from a close language, or difficult comparability of two original texts), it seems fruitful to use the intermediary of another language which is typologically and genetically more distant. This study is hence based on a corpus of English and Norwegian texts translated from the Czech original.