Lexicogrammar through colligation: Noun + Preposition in English and Norwegian

This study compares sequences of noun and preposition in English and Norwegian using data from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. One purpose is to test the use of sequences of part-of-speech tags as a search method for contrastive studies. The other is to investigate the functions and meanings of prepositional phrases in the position after a noun across the two languages. The comparison of original texts shows that the function of postmodifier is most frequent in both languages, with adverbial in second place. Other functions are rare. English has more postmodifiers and fewer adverbials than Norwegian. Furthermore, the prepositional phrases express locative meaning, in both functions, more frequently in Norwegian than in English. The study of translations reveals that the adverbials have congruent correspondences more often than postmodifiers, particularly in translations from English into Norwegian.

Hope for the future: An analysis of HOPE/HÅP(E) across genres and languages

This article reports on a contrastive study of the cognate nouns and verbs hope and håp(e) that investigates their lexico-grammatical conditions of use in English vs. Norwegian fiction texts and football match reports. The complex dataset consists of material from a parallel corpus of fiction texts and a comparable corpus of football match reports. An interesting finding is that the verb use outnumbers the noun use in the fiction texts, whereas the noun use outnumbers the verb use in the match reports in both languages. Moreover, the analysis of the lemmas suggests that they have similar potential of use but with slightly different preferences, both across the genres and languages. It is also suggested that the English lemmas are more consistently used in negative contexts than the Norwegian ones. Finally, the method of combining data from two different types of contrastive corpora proved fruitful, as the results become more robust.

Prepositional phraseological patterns in Czech and English

This pilot study aims to identify differences in native and non-native phraseologies, focussing on prepositional patterns. Previous research suggests L2 users’ limited phraseological choices may hinder the accuracy of their language production, and prepositions can pose a particular challenge to Czech learners of English, given the lack of correspondence between translation equivalents. Further, prepositional patterns contribute to text structuring, making them an important part of learners´ competence. Using representative corpora of English and Czech, 3- to 5-grams containing the equivalent preposition pair in/v are extracted. The identified patterns are classified by their semantics and textual functions. While in/v patterns mostly fulfil corresponding functions in the languages compared, the distribution of these functions differs. Specifically, some pattern types are only found in English, highlighting its analytic nature as opposed to inflectional Czech.

TELLING in English, Norwegian and French: A three-way contrast

This paper presents the results of a study of double object constructions containing the cognate verbs English tell and Norwegian fortelle, based on data from the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus. The results show that there is a certain degree of correspondence between the two verbs in constructions with nominal direct objects, with less mutual correspondence in constructions with finite clausal objects, very little correspondence in constructions with objects in the form of direct speech, and none whatsoever in the case of non-finite clausal objects, which only occur with tell. The paper then expands the topic to include tell predications in French. The data were retrieved from the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. It transpires that the form of French translations of Norwegian expressions are more similar, at least for some constructions, to the Norwegian originals than are their English counterparts.

RAF, DNA and CAPTCHA: English acronyms in German and Swedish translation

This study investigates acronyms in English originals and their translations into German and Swedish, comparing forms, functions and distributions across the languages. The material was collected from the Linnaeus English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS) consisting of original and translated popular non-fiction. From a structural point of view, acronyms most often occur as independent noun heads (When IBM introduced […]) or as premodifiers in a noun phrase (PGP encryption). Due to morphosyntactic differences, English acronym premodifiers often merge into hyphenated compounds in German translations (UN-Klimakonvention), but less frequently so in Swedish. The study also discusses explicitation practices when introducing source-culture specific acronyms in the translations. German translators explain and elaborate more than Swedish translators and they do so in the German language. Swedish translators, however, use English to a greater extent, suggesting that Swedish readers are expected to have better knowledge of English than German readers.

Relativizers as markers of grammatical complexity: A diachronic, cross-register study of English and German

In this paper, we investigate grammatical complexity as a register feature of scientific English and German. Specifically, we carry out a diachronic comparison between general and scientific discourse in the two languages from the 17th to the 19th century, using relativizers as proxies for grammatical complexity. We ground our study in register theory (Halliday and Hasan, 1985), assuming that language use reflects contextual factors, which contribute to the formation of registers (Quirk et al., 1985; Biber et al., 1999; Teich et al., 2016). Our findings show a clear tendency towards grammatical simplification in scientific discourse in both languages with English spearheading the trend early on and German following later.

Moving up and down in real space

The paper focuses on the role of the Swedish spatial particles upp ‘up’ and ner ‘down’ to signal the endpoint-of-motion in the description of motion situations and is based on Swedish original fiction texts and their translations into English, German, French and Finnish. Frequently the endpoint is marked with a locative preposition such as på ‘on’ or i ‘in’, and then a particle is required to signal change-of-place. In German and Finnish, the particle is often zero translated and change-of-place is indicated by case. The particle is often zero translated also in French, a V(erb)-framed language. This leads to contrasts at the conceptual level since verticality is not expressed. The result points to radical intra-typological differences between S(atellite)-framed languages in the expression of Path depending on general morpho-syntactic differences. Another important conclusion is that several different classes of motion verbs must be distinguished even in S-languages to describe the expression of change-of-place.

Analysing complex contrastive data

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Eyes and speech in English, Finnish and Czech children’s literature

This study explores cross-linguistically, in English, Czech and Finnish, eye-behaviour that occurs in children’s fiction in the vicinity of character speech. We explore how authentic eye behaviour, as an important part of non-verbal communication, is rendered in fictional worlds. While there are more similarities than differences across the languages in the characteristics and narrative functions of fictional eye-behaviour, the linguistic encoding differs substantially due to typological differences between the languages. The same semantic roles are often expressed by divergent syntactic means. The divergence is reflected primarily in the relative weight of different word-order principles, the different means of indicating simultaneity, as well as the role of inflection in Finnish and Czech.

Pragmatic annotation of a domain-restricted English-Spanish comparable corpus

This paper explores the multi-layer annotation of a written domain-restricted English-Spanish comparable corpus (CLANES – Controlled LANguage English Spanish), focusing on pragmatic annotation. The annotation scheme draws on part of speech tagging and a semantic annotation scheme, i.e. the UCREL Semantic Analysis System, with some added categories to fit the food-and-drink domain represented in CLANES. These are used to build significant (pragmatic) metapatterns. Seven different pragmatic functions have been identified in our corpus, namely <STATE>, <DIRECT>, <SUGGEST>, <RECOMMEND>, <PRAISE>, <EVIDENCE> and <RELATE TO READER>. Computer scripts translate this linguistic information into regular expressions to be used in unsupervised annotation. Partial results indicate that applying lexical restrictors boosts the success rate considerably. However, metadata is preferred because of increased replicability and generality. Replicability issues and limitations encountered during testing are also addressed.