English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus Research Articles

Simple and complex help constructions in English and Norwegian

Abstract This paper reports on a study of verbal help constructions in English and Norwegian. It is based on data from the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus, and discusses 11 constructions in all, nine of which have a close parallel in the other language. The constructions vary in syntactic complexity from the simple intransitive, on the one-hand, to complex-transitives containing infinitive complements, on the other. The hypothesis is advanced that the simpler the basic syntactic structure of a construction, the more likely it is to be translated by a construction with a similar syntax. This hypothesis receives no support from the data. On the contrary, it is more complex constructions, containing an explicit helpee, that are more likely to be translated by a syntactically similar construction.

Concessive subordination in English and Norwegian

Abstract This paper investigates concessive markers, primarily subordinators, in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. The initial question is how English and Norwegian concessive markers compare with regard to their frequencies and syntactic functions, both intra- and cross-linguistically. Overall, the languages are relatively similar. However, individual concessive markers differ in frequency, syntactic flexibility and possibly formality in original texts in both languages. The second research question concerns the placement of concessive clauses. Again the languages are rather similar, but there is variation within both languages, with subordinators having individual positional preferences. Finally, the translations of the subordinators are examined. Concessive markers are overrepresented in Norwegian translations and underrepresented in English translations compared to originals. While translation correspondences are often congruent, the mutual correspondence between pairs of subordinators is low. Changes made in translation suggest that Norwegian chooses coordination more often than English, thus displaying less syntactic complexity.

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.

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.

Dialogue vs. narrative in fiction

AbstractThis paper explores both comparable and translation data from the fiction part of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) in a new way. Rather than studying fiction as a unified register, we investigate to what extent fiction can be seen to contain (at least) two distinct registers – dialogue and narrative – and to what extent this may have implications for contrastive studies based on a corpus such as the ENPC. Token counts show that, although the texts are predominantly narrative in nature, the Norwegian texts are even more so than the English ones. On the basis of word lists, two items proportionally more frequent in dialogue and that had previously been studied on the basis of the fiction texts in the ENPC were identified and chosen for further scrutiny:thereandsee. Results from these two case studies uncover some differences in the use ofthereandseein dialogue vs. narrative, most conspicuously forseewhere its preferred use in dialogue is the cognition sense and in narrative the perception sense. Forthere, a noticeable difference is the choice of verb in the Norwegian translations of existentialthere-clauses in dialogue and narrative. In narrative, verbs other than verbs of existence are sometimes chosen, while this is never the case in dialogue.

Exploring cross-linguistic congruence: The case of two stance frames in English and Norwegian

This paper explores the degree of congruence between two closely related languages – English and Norwegian – in a case study of the two stance frames it BE * that and det VÆRE * at. It is first established that the open slot in the frames is most typically occupied by an adjective, thus steering this investigation towards a more detailed comparison of it BE ADJ that and det VÆRE ADJ at. The adjective determines the evaluative orientation of the frames, and, following Lemke (1998), the present study operates with seven categories to establish the attitudes and evaluations present in the frames. The study, which draws on material from a bidirectional translation corpus – the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus+, reveals that the degree of congruence between the frames to some extent seems to depend on the attitude/evaluation expressed. Furthermore, the study reveals that there is 45% non-congruence between the languages. The translational correspondence network of the English and Norwegian patterns is broad, showing that there are a number of linguistic resources in the two languages that can be used to express attitudinal/evaluative stance. It is concluded that, while English and Norwegian are shown to have similar means of expressing attitudinal meanings with the frames, the two languages have their preferred ways of doing so both in terms of individual adjectives and attitudinal/evaluative class.

Sentence-initial indefinite subjects in English and Norwegian

The present study uses the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus to investigate the frequency and use of indefinite noun phrases as subjects in English and Norwegian. Since subjects in both languages tend to appear clause-initially, indefinite subjects represent a deviation from the information principle. The clearest difference between the languages is the greater frequency of indefinite subject NPs in English. The lexicogrammatical features of the indefinite subjects and their immediate contexts are relatively similar in both languages. The indefinite subjects most commonly occur with intransitive verb phrases, and often in clauses with presentative or generic meaning. Translation correspondences of indefinite subjects show that the subject NP is retained in congruent form in the majority of cases, but more changes are made in translations from English into Norwegian than the other way round. This is taken to support the findings of the contrastive analysis and furthermore indicates that the light subject constraint is applied more strictly in Norwegian than in English.

Bringing home the bacon! A contrastive study of the cognates bring/bringe in English and Norwegian

This paper highlights the value of a bidirectional translation corpus in contrastive studies in an investigation of the cross-linguistic relationship between two cognates in English and Norwegian: bring and bringe. Although monolingual and bilingual dictionaries prove to be excellent sources of information in respect of this relationship, the present study contributes further to our knowledge regarding the cognates’ conditions of use. Drawing on material from the fiction part of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), the study reveals that English bring is far more frequent than its Norwegian counterpart. By exploring the close to 500 occurrences of the two words in original and translated texts, it becomes clear that the two verbs have a relatively low Mutual Correspondence. That is, overall, they only correspond to each other in translation in roughly 20% of the cases. This low correspondence rate is surprising, given the fact that we are looking at verbs stemming from the same origin in two closely related languages. The corpus correspondences suggest that there may be at least two main reasons for this. First, Norwegian bringe may be considered more formal than English bring and there is thus a preference for using less formal verbs in Norwegian to express the meaning of bring, notably the multi-word verbs ha med (REFL) ‘have with (REFL)’, ta med (REFL) ‘take with (REFL)’ and komme med ‘come with’. Second, English bring is more versatile than Norwegian bringe, particularly in the sense that it more readily forms part of phrasal verbs and fixed phrases. It is also the case that English bring has come to be used with a wider range of meanings than Norwegian bringe, as attested in the dictionaries consulted. These ‘extra’ meanings include ‘initiate legal action against someone’ and ‘force oneself to do something (unpleasant)’; however, neither of these meanings is particularly salient in the current data. The findings underline the role a parallel corpus such as the ENPC can play in shedding light on contrastive nuances that contribute to a broader understanding of cross-linguistic relationships.

Does corpus size matter? Revisiting ENPC case studies with an extended version of the corpus

The validity of contrastive findings that base themselves on material from small parallel corpora may be questioned, and ever since the compilation of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) and English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) some 20 years ago we have been aware of this. Recently, the ENPC has been expanded into the ENPC+, holding bidirectional translation data three times the size of the fiction part of the original ENPC. Drawing on material from the ENPC+, this paper replicates three contrastive studies made on the basis of the fiction part of the original ENPC to explore to what extent corpus size matters. The replica studies suggest that individual style, genre and date of publication are variables that may have a greater impact on the results than mere corpus size.

<i>The way of the world</i>: the colligational framework “the N1 of the N2” and its Norwegian correspondences

The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus is used to study the colligational framework “the N1 of the N2” (e.g. the way of the world). The aim is to discover recurrent patterns in the lexical and semantic make-up of such sequences in English and their correspondences in Norwegian. The correspondences are described in terms of both structure and meaning. In spite of similarities in the structural potential of English and Norwegian noun phrases, the majority “the N1 of the N2” sequences have divergent correspondences in Norwegian. This points to differences between the languages in their preferred lexicogrammatical patterns. The study confirms the feasibility of carrying out crosslinguistic studies on the basis of patterns of function words.

Coding Betweenness in Swedish and Norwegian Translations from English

This paper examines the way in which the semantic notion of ‘betweenness’ is coded in Swedish and Norwegian translations of the same English source texts. The study takes its starting point in the contention that the original English expressions of ‘betweenness’ containing the prepositionbetweenconstitute a viabletertium comparationisfor translations of that form into the other two languages. A classification of all occurrences ofbetweenin the English source texts in The English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) and The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) in terms of the semantic role of the landmarks in the predications is followed by an analysis of the translations, both congruent and divergent. The primary focus, however, is not on the correspondences between the English original and its translations into Swedish and Norwegian, but on the parallels between the two sets of translations. To this end comparisons are drawn between the Swedish and Norwegian renderings of the various meanings ofbetweenin the source data. The analysis shows that Swedish and Norwegian resemble one another closely in the means employed to code the various senses ofbetween. The last part of the study offers a complementary perspective in comparing occurrences of the most common translation equivalents ofbetween,mellanin Swedish andmellomin Norwegian, in contexts where they do not translatebetweenin the English source texts. This approach reveals that, despite the lack ofbetweenin the original texts, the two sets of translators both employ the cognate prepositions in over 25% of cases.

Norwegian synes and tro and their English translations

The paper explores the possibility of using translation corpora for disambiguating the semantic content with some basic implications for second language acquisition. Norwegian verbs 'synes' and 'tro' are used as a baseline for the comparison. Their semantic content is systematically explored with help of the translation pairs found in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. This article shows how translation corpora and contrastive analysis help to clarify similarities and differences in meaning and how it can clarify differences between the compared languages.

An English-Norwegian contrastive analysis of downtoners, more or less

In this paper we present a contrastive study of the downtoners more or less and mer eller mindre. After establishing that these two binomials have developed along similar paths in English and Norwegian, can be found to occur in the same syntactic environments in the two languages and, indeed, have the same meanings, we seek explanations as to why they are not used as translations of each other in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus to the extent that would be expected of two such seemingly perfect matches. The picture that emerges is a complex one. First, more or less is much more frequent than mer eller mindre, both in source (original) and target (translation) texts. Next, more or less corresponds to many more Norwegian expressions in the data, than vice versa, signalling a wider repertoire of use than its Norwegian counterpart. Finally, mer eller mindre is used as a premodifier and as a degree adjunct in approximately the same number of instances, while the degree adjunct use is dominant in the English data for more or less. The paper introduces the reverse mutual correspondence measure to complement the more established mutual correspondence measure, introduced by Altenberg (1999), to add another dimension to contrastive analysis based on bidirectional translation corpus data.

An eye for an eye? Exploring the cross-linguistic phraseology ofeye/øye

Previous studies have shown the productive nature ofeyeand how it enters into patterns of a more or less non-compositional nature (e.g. Sinclair 1991a, Więcławska 2012). This paper adds a contrastive dimension and explores the cross-linguistic phraseology of the English–Norwegian cognateseyeandøyeon the basis of monolingual, bilingual and multilingual corpora. Starting with a survey of uses in the bidirectional English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus+ (ENPC+), the contrastive analysis reveals that while the two languages overlap in many of their uses ofeye/øye-expressions, differences also emerge, particularly with regard to the number of recurrent patterns recorded and their conditions of use. English has more recurrent patterns witheye, but Norwegian has by far the most frequent pattern,fåøye på‘catch sight of’ (lit.: get eye on). Following this general cross-linguistic survey, a focused contrastive case study offåøye påand its English correspondences shows how a combination of bilingual and monolingual corpora may complement each other in contrastive research. The study uncovers that English has three main correspondences –catchsight of,seeandspot– of which the first is the one favoured by bilingual dictionaries. An in-depth analysis offåøye påandcatchsight ofand their extended context, i.e. when they are part of extended units of meaning (e.g. Sinclair 1996), suggests that although the two patterns are perfectly matched, there are substantial differences when it comes to their frequency of use. This contributes to the relatively low mutual correspondences in the bidirectional translation material at hand.

Clausal modifiers in noun phrases: A comparison of English and Norwegian based on the Oslo Multilingual Corpus

The structure of the noun phrase has many common features in English and Norwegian. One feature shared by the two languages is that noun phrases often contain clausal postmodifiers. However, there are marked differences in the types of clauses occurring: Postmodifying clauses in Norwegian tend to be finite relative clauses, while in English there is much more variation, connected with the general fact that -ing clauses and past-participle clauses are common non-finite alternatives in that language, in addition to infinitive clauses. These all tend to be less explicit modifiers than relative clauses, in terms of both their semantic content and their syntactic structure. The study reported in this article confirms that Norwegian noun phrases are often characterised by a higher degree of explicitness than corresponding English ones. A major finding is a tendency for information which is expressed by clausal noun-phrase modifiers in English to be expressed by other means in Norwegian, sometimes outside the same noun phrase, which can often be seen as the extreme case of explicitness. The study is based on an investigation of corresponding noun phrases in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), part of the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. In an attempt to offset the impact of individual translators’ preferences, the Multiple-translation Corpus, consisting of ten different Norwegian translations of each of two English Original texts, is also examined.

Cross-linguistic semantic prosody: The case of ‘commit’, ‘signs of’ and ‘utterly’ and their Norwegian correspondences

This paper reports on a contrastive study of semantic prosody in English and Norwegian. Semantic prosody refers to the communicative function of extended units of meaning (Sinclair 1996, Stubbs 2013), i.e. «the semantic prosody of an item is the reason why it is chosen, over and above the semantic preferences that also characterise it» (Sinclair 1998: 20), where an item is equated with the sequence of words constituting an extended unit of meaning.
 
 The paper presents three case studies of English units with an established negative prosody containing the core items ‘commit’, ‘signs of’ and ‘utterly’. The Norwegian correspondences of these items are identified on the basis of a bidirectional corpus, viz. the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. These correspondences serve as the starting point for an investigation of cross-linguistic prosodies. It is shown that while units with ‘commit’ and ‘signs of’ have good Norwegian matches in terms of semantic prosody, units with ‘utterly’ are less stable across the two languages, underlining the importance of carrying out studies of this kind in order to improve the cross-linguistic understanding of extended units of meaning. This in turn has implications for how teachers, translators and lexicographers choose to present words in isolation or as part of larger, extended units.

‘To find oneself a partner’ vs. ‘to find a partner’

This paper investigates the patterns V REFL NPindef and V NPindef in an English-Norwegian contrastive perspective. Both languages have a set of verbs that may enter into both patterns, as illustrated in the title by ‘find’ and in Norwegian by finne. On the basis of material drawn from the extended fiction version of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus, it can be established that the two languages operate differently with regard to the frequency and use of the patterns. The investigation focuses on four verbs in particular, pour, ta ‘take’, find and finne ‘find’, with the aim of establishing to what extent the two patterns exist side by side within the two languages, to what extent they are interchangeable in text, and to what extent they correspond to each other cross-linguistically. While the study reveals that they do exist side by side, a more complex picture emerges with regard to how interchangeable they are and to what extent they correspond to each other across the languages. As the patterns as such do not seem to have a uniform meaning, the verb becomes all the more important for the choice of the reflexive vs. the non-reflexive pattern. Cross-linguistically, although the patterns are seen to correspond to each other in some contexts, different preferences emerge for each pattern and verb in the two languages.

A relevance-theoretic analysis of concept narrowing and broadening in English and Norwegian original texts and translations

This paper studies the lexical-pragmatic processes of narrowing and broadening of conceptual content in the relation between original texts and their corresponding translations in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) from a relevance-theoretic point of view. It is suggested that, in at least some cases, translations can be seen as a kind of mirror reflecting the pragmatic processes at work in lexical interpretation. A translator may choose to render an underspecified concept encoded in a source text by a word that more closely encodes the interpretation given to the concept in question, in which case the semantics/pragmatics distinction (as it applies to the source text) will be made explicit in the relation between source and target text. In other cases, the comparison of source and target text shows that similar lexical encodings in the two languages do not necessarily provide the same possibilities for lexical broadening.

Using the ENPC and the ESPC as a Parallel Translation Corpus: Adverbs of Frequency and Usuality1

The topic for the present study is intended to represent a common denominator between my own research and Karin Aijmer’s. The EnglishNorwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) are sister corpora with common objectives, design criteria, and structures; cf. Aijmer et al (1996:79 f). Especially their fiction parts also share a good number of texts. One advantage of this is that it is possible not only to compare English to Norwegian and Swedish respectively, but also to compare different translations of the English originals with each other. Adverbs of frequency and usuality were chosen as a test case for the feasibility of using the ENPC and the ESPC as a parallel translation corpus, i.e. one which contains alternative translations of the same text. This was partly because I have worked with time adverbials previously (e.g. Hasselgard 1996) and partly because usuality can be viewed as a category of modality (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004:147), a topic closely associated with the research of Karin Aijmer. The questions discussed in the present paper are the following: how are adverbs of frequency and usuality translated into Norwegian and Swedish? To what extent can the translations from English in the ENPC and the ESPC be seen as parallel/alternative translations? Are Norwegian and Swedish similar enough to be regarded as alternative translations? In other words: to what extent are the same options available in both languages? And finally, assuming that usuality is a modal category – how

Multilingual corpora: models, methods, uses

O presente artigo relata nossos trabalhos com corpora multilíngües na Universidade de Oslo. Diferentes modelos de corpora são apresentados, em especial, o modelo bidirecional de tradução usado no English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC). As etapas de construção do ENPC são descritas de forma sucinta, acompanhadas de alguns comentários acerca dos problemas encontrados. Grande parte do artigo é dedicada aos usos desse tipo de corpus. Há também uma breve introdução à ferramenta de busca desenvolvida para o ENPC. O principal objetivo aqui é mostrar que o modelo bidirecional de corpus de tradução possibilita a realização de estudos contrastivos e permite, simultaneamente, observar efeitos de tradução. A noção de correspondência mútua, introduzida por Bent Altenberg, é discutida quando comentamos seu estudo sobre conectores adverbias em inglês e sueco, desenvolvido com base no corpus English-Swedish Parallel Corpus, criado segundo os mesmos parâmetros do ENPC. Como exemplo de efeitos de tradução, são tecidos alguns comentários quanto à distribuição de dois verbos de posição no ENPC: o norueguês stå e seu cognato em inglês stand. A diferença é mais marcada em textos originais; já nas traduções, a distribuição é claramente influenciada pelos textos originais.