Fields of expertise
Modern English grammar, text linguistics, phraseology, corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, English as a foreign language, learner corpus research
Teaching
I teach a range of English language courses at all levels within English grammar, phonetics, systemic-functional linguistics, discourse analysis, contrastive analysis, learner corpus analysis, corpus linguistics and phraseology.
Online teaching resources
Glossary of grammatical terms
Writing a term paper in English corpus linguistics
Ongoing and recent research projects at ILOS
- Norwegian Learner English Corpus (NLEC). Early-phase corpus project with Pia Sundqvist to learn about the effects of Extramural English on English proficiency among Norwegian pupils. NLEC has sister projects in Sweden, with comparable corpora of Swedish and Chinese learners (Pia Sundqvist, Henrik Kaatari, Tove Larsson, Ying Wang).
- Partner in the international corpus project VESPA (with Signe O. Ebeling) compiling a corpus of English L2 texts within linguistics, literature and business studies.
- Corpus-based exploration of lexical and grammatical features of advanced learner English across disciplines.
- Contrastive studies based on comparable and parallel corpora such as the Oslo Multilingual Corpus.
- Idiomaticity in English and Norwegian: Corpus-based approaches.
- Previously I was a member of the (completed) interfacultary project Kunnskap i skolen / Knowledge in Schools within the sub-project "Language in Education"
Current administrative duties and academic service
- Co-ordinator for English language and linguistics teaching at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages. (2023-2024)
- Chair of the board of the Norwegian Study Centre in York (since 2024; board member since 2021).
- Member of the scientific committee for Teksthuben, ILN
Other
Tags:
English,
English language,
English grammar,
Corpus linguistics,
Systemic-functional linguistics,
Contrastive linguistics,
Learner language
Publications
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2026).
Of-constructions in the Interlanguage of Norwegian Learners of English: A Pseudo-longitudinal Study.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES).
ISSN 1502-7694.
25(2),
p. 110–137.
doi:
10.35360/njes.v25i2.63497.
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The most frequent preposition in English is of. Despite its frequency it can be difficult for learners because many of its central uses are abstract. This paper examines the usage of of among young Norwegian learners of English at different study levels. The emphasis is on the forms and functions of the phrases containing of, with special attention to noun phrases (NPs). The material comes from a corpus of pupil writing (TRAWL), with random samples from years 8, 10, and 11 (ages c. 13–16). This is compared to samples from learners at tertiary level (ICLE-NO) and young English L1 users (Growth-in-Grammar corpus). The overall frequency of of increases with study level, and more importantly, the samples indicate qualitative changes in its use. Generally, NP postmodification is the dominant use, and it increases after year 8. Multi-word units (e.g., a lot of, of course) take up a smaller share of the samples after year 10. Within the N1 of N2 pattern, the proportions of quantifying and part-whole patterns decrease, while nominalizations, possession, and support-noun constructions increase. NP length remains stable, but the co-occurrence of pre- and postmodifiers rises with proficiency. The ICLE-NO sample generally has a greater share of advanced uses than TRAWL 11 except for a lower proportion of nominalizations. The L1 writers align with TRAWL 10 and/or 11 in most respects. The material thus suggests a development towards less reliance on fixed-phrase uses and a wider range of lexicogrammatical environments for of.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2026).
Aspectual catenatives in three English and Norwegian registers (fiction , non-fiction, and academic prose).
In Rørvik, Sylvi & Izquierdo, Marlén (Ed.),
Cross-linguistic Register Variation.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ISSN 9789027233943.
p. 85–112.
doi:
10.1075/scl.125.04has.
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This paper investigates verb phrases with aspectual catenatives expressing the beginning, continuation, or end of an activity, for instance begin/continue/cease to V. The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the KIAP corpus are used to compare three registers of English and Norwegian: fiction, non-fiction and academic prose. Results show that aspectual catenatives are generally more frequent in English than in Norwegian, especially those denoting continuation and end. The most frequently expressed aspect overall is beginning. In both languages aspectual catenatives are most widespread in fiction and least in academic prose. Register also influences lexical choice. In translation, non-congruent correspondences are most widespread with continuation and end, suggesting that the languages may prefer different expressions of these aspectual meanings.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2025).
Verbal group complexes in Norwegian.
Lingua.
ISSN 0024-3841.
324.
doi:
10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103971.
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This article presents a corpus-based study of hypotactic verbal group complexes (VGCs) in Norwegian with the form ‘verb^infinitive marker^verb’, for instance begynne å lese (‘begin to read’). The aims are to identify the meanings expressed by such VGCs in terms of the primary and secondary verbs that occur in them, thereby illuminating the nature of the verbs that occur in such VGCs and any additional meanings that arise from the collocation of primary and secondary verb. Particular attention is paid to VGCs expressing conation, time phase, and usuality. Findings show that meaning categories are unequally represented in the corpus in terms of frequency. A large majority of VGCs express material processes. While some of the VGC meanings overlap with those of tense, aspect or modality, others go beyond these systems. VGCs can thus be seen as a supplement to the systems of tense and modality in that they can include meanings in the verbal group that are not fully grammaticalized. In addition, some of the meaning categories are associated with particular semantic prosodies, especially involving ‘effort’, ‘difficulty’ and ‘voluntary action’.
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Larsson, Tove; Callies, Marcus; Dixon, Tülay; Hasselgård, Hilde; Hober, Nicole & Laso, Natalia Judith
[Show all 9 contributors for this article]
(2025).
Adverb placement in L1 and L2 spoken production. The effect of linguistic and extralinguistic factors.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
ISSN 1384-6655.
doi:
10.1075/ijcl.23047.lar.
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Most existing research on adverb placement has focused exclusively on writing. This is unfortunate, given that the spoken mode offers limited opportunity for pre-planning and post-editing and may thus more readily reveal patterns of L1 transfer. Further, previous studies rarely consider the impact of the linguistic context surrounding the adverb. This study broadens our understanding of (i) the potential role of L1 transfer, and (ii) the extralinguistic and linguistic factors that influence adverb placement. We look at spoken English produced by students from seven L1 backgrounds: Dutch, English, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. The results show that the most influential factors in explaining differences in adverb placement were the presence or absence of auxiliaries and the type of adverb. We find only very limited evidence of L1 transfer, suggesting that upper-intermediate to advanced learners have largely mastered the positional preferences of adverbs in English, even in restrictive production contexts.
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Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2025).
English GO and Norwegian GÅ: Lexicogrammatical patterns and translation paradigms.
Languages in Contrast: International Journal for Contrastive Linguistics.
ISSN 1387-6759.
doi:
10.1075/lic.00054.ebe.
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This article investigates the cognate verbs go and gå in an English-Norwegian contrastive perspective. On the basis of bidirectional translation data, the study contributes new insight regarding their relatively low cross-linguistic correspondence rate. Although the verbs share many of their lexicogrammatical features, some notable exceptions are uncovered. English go seems to be semantically more flexible than gå in some of its uses, while Norwegian gå is arguably syntactically more versatile. As a consequence, the cross-linguistic relationship between the verbs is far from straightforward, and translations are clearly influenced by diverging polysemies and lexicogrammatical preferences.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2024).
Periphrastic Genitive Constructions in English and Norwegian.
In Čermáková, Anna; Hasselgård, Hilde; Malà, Markéta & Šebestová, Denisa (Ed.),
Contrastive Corpus Linguistics. Patterns in Lexicogrammar and Discourse.
Bloomsbury Academic.
ISSN 9781350385931.
p. 62–86.
doi:
10.5040/9781350385962.0010.
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This chapter investigates periphrastic genitives in English and Norwegian realized by a PP with of and til (“to”), respectively. Even if the resources are similar between the languages (periphrastic expression vs. an s-genitive), the frequency and use of the expressions are not. A key difference concerns the animacy of the possessor, which promotes the s-genitive in English and the periphrastic genitive in Norwegian. English and Norwegian periphrastic genitives also differ as to the meaning relations between the possessor and the possessum. Thus, most translations of periphrastic genitives are noncongruent. This indicates that the of-genitive has a wider meaning than the Norwegian til-genitive. In contrast, Norwegian uses a variety of prepositions to distinguish different possessive(-like) relations.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2024).
Concessive subordination in English and Norwegian.
Languages in Contrast: International Journal for Contrastive Linguistics.
ISSN 1387-6759.
24(1),
p. 109–132.
doi:
10.1075/lic.00037.has.
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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.
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Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2024).
Combining Mutual Correspondence and Textual Variation in a Study of English GO and Norwegian GÅ.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES).
ISSN 1502-7694.
23(2),
p. 6–33.
doi:
10.35360/njes.v23i2.39157.
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This article expands and nuances the procedures of calculating translation bias (TB) and mutual correspondence (MC) in contrastive studies. Both measures are intended to show how similar, or mutually translatable, two linguistic items are across languages. Traditionally, these procedures have been carried out without attending to variation across individual texts in a corpus. In a contrastive case study of English GOand Norwegian GÅ,we calculate the TB and MC of the fully congruent instances, i.e.,instances where the verbs correspond to each other in the same lexicogrammatical patterns, both in the traditional way and in a newly developed procedure where textual distribution is integrated into the measures. The study substantiates the initial hypothesis that the distributive variants of TB and MC—Distributive Translation Biasand Distributive Mutual Correspondences—are more informative and reliable, as the values more accurately show the range and distribution of correspondences.The study also suggests that the strict definition of congruence adopted (requiring lexicogrammatical correspondence) is better suited to capture details of cross-linguistic similarity than simply to require formal correspondence at the level of word class.This is made evident by the varying degrees of mutual correspondence in the different verb categories, e.g.,the generally higher correspondence measures for intransitive GO and GÅ compared to the phrasal verb use.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2023).
Seem and Appear and Their Norwegian Verbal Counterparts: A Cross-Register Contrastive Study.
English Studies: A Journal of English Language.
ISSN 0013-838X.
104(1),
p. 173–200.
doi:
10.1080/0013838X.2022.2154046.
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Verbs such as seem and appear combine features of evidential meaning with epistemic modality. This study takes a corpus-based, contrastive view of such verbs in Norwegian and English. It investigates the frequencies, patterns and meanings of seem, appear and their Norwegian correspondences virke, synes and se ut in English fiction and academic prose. Both similarities and differences are found across languages and registers. Appear and synes are clearly more frequent in academic prose and can therefore be characterised as more formal. Of all the verbs investigated, seem has the greatest syntactic flexibility. The Norwegian verbs show more syntactic variation across lexemes than the English verbs do. The English verbs are arguably more grammaticalised in their evidential meanings: they occur more regularly with catenative function, and are also complemented directly by NPs and nominal clauses rather than by PPs and adverbial clauses, which is often the pattern of the Norwegian verbs.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2023).
Impersonal passives in English and Norwegian.
In Gentens, Caroline; Ghesquière, Lobke; McGregor, William B. & linden, An Van (Ed.),
Reconnecting Form and Meaning, In honour of Kristin Davidse.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ISSN 9789027212993.
p. 45–69.
doi:
10.1075/slcs.230.02has.
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This chapter investigates passive constructions with an expletive subject, labelled as impersonal passives. The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) provides material for comparison across both constructions and languages. The
extracted dataset shows a higher frequency of impersonal passives in Norwegian, chiefly due to two patterns that English does not have, i.e. passives with intransitive verbs and transitive verbs which retain their postverbal complement in the passive. The study considers the communicative functions of the constructions, the process types of the passivized verbs, the expression of agency, and the thematic structure of clauses with impersonal passives, finding both differences and similarities. Translations between the languages are, however, most often non-congruent, even with extraposition and parentheticals, which exist in both languages.
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Paquot, Magali; Larsson, Tove; Hasselgård, Hilde; Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell; Meyere, Damien De & Valentin, Larry
[Show all 9 contributors for this article]
(2022).
The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA): Towards a multi-L1 and multi-register learner corpus of disciplinary writing.
Research in Corpus Linguistics.
10(2),
p. 1–15.
doi:
10.32714/ricl.10.02.02.
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The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA first release) is the result of an international corpus compilation project that aims to address the lack of large-scale, open access, multi-L1, multi-discipline and multi-register learner corpora. This corpus report provides a detailed description of VESPA and illustrates possible uses of the corpus for register exploration of learner data. Specifically, it first offers an overview of the makeup of the corpus and the online interface that can be used to search and download the corpus. It then gives an illustrative example of a study where multi-dimensional analysis was used to investigate the relative importance of register vis-à-vis other factors in learner academic writing. In the concluding remarks, we identify priorities for future developments in the VESPA project, including the addition of more L1 components, more disciplines and more registers, as well as the compilation of a comparable corpus of native student writing.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2022).
Adverb-adjective combinations in young writers' English (EL1 and EL2).
Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning (NJLTL).
10(2),
p. 383–403.
doi:
10.46364/njltl.v10i2.1077.
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The topic of the present study is adverb-adjective combinations in narrative writing by lower secondary school pupils in Norway and the UK. The investigation is based on subsets of the TRAWL and GiG corpora and thus compares English as a second language with first-language usage (EL2 and EL1). A number of differences were identified between the two writer groups. While the construction was more frequent and widespread in EL2, it showed more variability in EL1 regarding syntax, semantics and lexical choice. In particular, the amplifying function of modifiers was more dominant in EL2 writing at the cost of other modifier functions. There was also a stronger concentration on a few highly frequent intensifiers in the EL2 than in the EL1 material.
Keywords: adjective modification, adverbs, intensification, narrative writing, English L1 and L2
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Hasund, Ingrid Kristine & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2022).
Writer/reader visibility in young learner writing: A
study of the TRAWL corpus of lower secondary school texts.
The Journal of Writing Research.
ISSN 2030-1006.
13(3),
p. 447–472.
doi:
10.17239/jowr-2022.13.03.04.
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Abstract: A pervasive finding in learner corpus research is that advanced EFL learners tend to overuse interactional features of writer/reader visibility (WRV) in their written academic texts, including first- and second-person pronouns, I think, modal adverbs, modal auxiliaries, and questions. Very little research has been done on younger learners, however. The present study is a mixed-methods investigation of WRV features in argumentative and expository genres in the TRAWL longitudinal corpus of learner texts from Norwegian lower secondary school. Comparisons are made with more advanced levels (undergraduate university students) using the Norwegian component of ICLE, ICLE-NO.
The results show that the TRAWL pupils use many WRV features in their writing, firstperson reference being especially frequent (with I dominating). Compared to the advanced learners in ICLE-NO, the TRAWL learners overuse some, but not all, features. One explanation for the high frequency of WRV features in TRAWL is that the prompts – both argumentative and expository – often request a personal style. Some expository prompts and texts are more impersonal, but overall there is little distinction between the genres. The pedagogical implications are that instructors need to be more specific about genre requirements, and create more obligatory prompts that do not request a personal style.
Keywords: genre, writer/reader visibility, learner corpora, young learner writing, EFL writing
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2022).
Attribution in novice academic writing.
English Text Construction.
ISSN 1874-8767.
14(2),
p. 203–230.
doi:
10.1075/etc.00047.has.
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Academic attribution, the direct acknowledgement of external sources, is investigated in two corpora of novice academic English, representing first and second language writing in linguistics. The forms and uses of attribution are analysed in a formal-functional framework. There is an overall underrepresentation of attribution in the learner corpus. However, the corpora have a similar proportional distribution of integral and non-integral attribution, but a difference in subtypes of these. Undated attributions are discussed as a special case. They occur in specific contexts, of which reference to course reading is peculiar to novice writing. Comparisons with expert corpora in Norwegian and English indicate that some, but not all, of the differences between the novice corpora may be linked to influence from the learners’ first language and culture. Keywords: academic English, novice writing, attribution, Norwegian learners of English
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2021).
Lexicogrammar through colligation: Noun + Preposition in English and Norwegian.
Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies (BeLLS).
11(1),
p. 145–161.
doi:
10.15845/bells.v11i1.3442.
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Title and editors of special issue: CROSSING THE BORDERS:ANALYSING COMPLEX CONTRASTIVE DATA.Edited by Anna Čermáková, Signe Oksefjell Ebeling, Magnus Levin and Jenny Ström Herold.
This study compares sequencesof noun and preposition in English and Norwegian usingdata 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, theprepositional 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.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2021).
Time adverbials in English and Norwegian news discourse.
In Čermáková, Anna; Egan, Thomas Laurence; Hasselgård, Hilde & Rørvik, Sylvi (Ed.),
Time in Languages, Languages in Time.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ISSN 9789027209689.
p. 201–227.
doi:
10.1075/scl.101.09has.
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This chapter examines time adverbials in English and Norwegian as evidenced in two corpora of news articles. The adverbials are identified through a manual, bottom-up procedure, and their syntactic realizations, semantic types and positions are analysed. The comparison includes the lexical realizations of time adverbials in both languages, partly through the lens of lexical priming. Similarities between the languages include the distribution of syntactic and semantic types of time adverbials. Cross-linguistic differences in adverbial placement are evident in clause-medial position, where English is more restrictive than Norwegian. The lexical comparison shows that the languages may differ in how similar meanings are realized. Furthermore, the lexical priming of some frequent lexical items reveals lexeme-specific and possibly register-specific patterns.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2020).
Corpus-based contrastive studies: Beginnings, developments and directions.
Languages in Contrast: International Journal for Contrastive Linguistics.
ISSN 1387-6759.
20(2),
p. 184–208.
doi:
10.1075/lic.00015.has.
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This article outlines the beginnings of corpus-based contrastive studies with special reference to the development of parallel corpora that took place in Scandinavia in the early 1990s under the direction of Stig Johansson. It then discusses multilingual corpus types and methodological issues of their exploration, including the tertium comparationis for contrastive studies based on different types of corpora. Some glimpses are offered of recent developments and current trends in the field, including the widening scope of corpus-based contrastive analysis, concerning language pairs as well as the kinds of topics studied and the methods used. The paper ends by identifying and discussing some challenges for the field and indicating prospects and directions for its future.
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Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2020).
Intensification in dialogue vs. narrative in a corpus of present-day English fiction.
In Jonsson, Ewa & Larsson, Tove (Ed.),
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts. In honor of Merja Kytö.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ISSN 9789027207654.
p. 302–316.
doi:
10.1075/scl.97.18ebe.
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This chapter examines adverbial intensification of adjectives in present-day English fiction, with the aim of establishing whether dialogic and narrative passages differ in this regard. Although the corpus is relatively small, the study indicates that the frequency of intensification differs across these two subregisters of fiction. Findings of a more qualitative nature include slight differences in preferred choice of intensifiers in dialogue (very > so > too) vs. narrative (so > too > very). Moreover, dialogue has a preference for evaluative adjectives, while narrative shows more variation. A comparison with authentic speech uncovered few clear patterns except the predominance of some high-frequency adverb-adjective combinations. Nevertheless, the differences between fictional dialogue and narrative demonstrate that linguistic phenomena may vary both within and across registers.
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Larsson, Tove; Callies, Marcus; Hasselgård, Hilde; Laso, Natalia Judith; Vuuren, Sanne Van & Verdaguer, Isabel
[Show all 7 contributors for this article]
(2020).
Adverb placement in EFL academic writing. Going beyond syntactic transfer.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
ISSN 1384-6655.
25(2),
p. 155–184.
doi:
10.1075/ijcl.19131.lar.
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The present study looks at adverb placement in expert writing and in first-language and second-language novice spoken and written production. The extent to which first-language (L1) transfer is still present in advanced learners’ written production is also investigated. The study uses data from one expert corpus (LOCRA), two native-speaker student corpora (BAWE and LOCNEC) and two learner corpora (VESPA and LINDSEI). The results highlight the importance of taking register into consideration, as clear distributional differences were found between spoken and written production. In addition, while considerable differences could be noted across L1 background in the spoken data, factors such as presence/absence of auxiliary, verb type (e.g. intransitive, copular/linking) and lexis were found to be most important for predicting adverb placement in the written data. Only very limited evidence of L1 transfer was found in the learners’ writing, suggesting that advanced learners have largely mastered the distributional preferences of adverbs.
Keywords: L2 writing, L1 transfer, learner corpus research, adverb placement, novice writing
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2020).
In the case of theme: Topic identifiers in English and Norwegian academic texts.
Contrastive Pragmatics: A Cross-Disciplinary Journal (JOCP).
ISSN 2666-0385.
1(1),
p. 108–135.
doi:
10.1163/26660393-12340001.
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This paper investigates the use of clause-initial constituents prefaced by topic-identifying expressions such as in terms of, in the case of and their Norwegian counterparts. The focus is on the nature, frequency and discourse functions of these in a corpus of published academic writing in English and Norwegian and across three disciplines. Such expressions are rather infrequent overall, but medicine uses them the least and linguistics the most in both languages. The functions of the construction can be compared either to those of left dislocation or to other types of clause-initial adverbials depending on the degree of coreference between the theme and some element in the rheme. The pattern with coreference is more common in Norwegian than in English. Generally, topic identifiers are used for announcing explicitly a theme that represents a topic shift or a contrast with the preceding discourse. The study contributes to contrastive pragmatics through its focus on the discourse-pragmatic functions of the expressions under study and the cross-linguistic comparison of this type of information structuring device across two disciplines of academic writing.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2019).
"The nature of the essays": The colligational framework ‘the N of the N’ in L1 and L2 novice academic English.
Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English.
20.
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This study investigates the use of the colligational framework ‘the N1 of the N2’ in novice academic English. The material comes from the English literature discipline in the Norwegian component of the VESPA corpus (Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase) and the BAWE corpus (British Academic Written English). The research questions concern the frequency, distribution, lexical realizations and meaning of the colligation in L1 and L2 novice academic English. Although the L2 users were expected to underuse the colligation due to cross-linguistic differences between English and Norwegian as well as the fact that phrasal complexity requires a high level of proficiency, the frequency of the pattern was found to be relatively similar between the two corpora. The second noun in the colligation shows more discipline-specificity than the first. The colligation has a high degree of variability in both corpora: the most recurrent lexical pattern is that in which the N1 represents a part and the N2 a literary work, as in the end of the novel. However, there were qualitative differences between the two datasets, the most important of which concerned cases in which the N1 is a nominalization. These were used more in L1 than in L2 along with support nouns, while the learners used the pattern with partitive and possessive meaning slightly more than the native speakers.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2019).
Phraseological teddy bears: frequent lexical bundles in academic writing by Norwegian learners and native speakers of English.
In Wiegand, Viola & Mahlberg, Michaela (Ed.),
Corpus Linguistics, Context and Culture.
De Gruyter Mouton.
ISSN 9783110486728.
p. 339–362.
doi:
10.1515/9783110489071-013.
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This chapter compares frequent four-word lexical bundles in a learner corpus (VESPA) and a native speaker corpus (BAWE), both representing novice academic writing. The frequencies and dispersion of bundles in the two corpora reveal patterns of both over- and underuse among the learners. The learners are shown to use some bundles very frequently, but frequencies drop more sharply than in the native corpus. The dispersion of the frequent bundles tends to be broader in the native speaker corpus. In a closer scrutiny of four selected bundles the novice-expert dimension is addressed by consulting a corpus of published research articles. Contrasts between English and Norwegian are also considered in order to explain the learners’ apparently non-native usage. Some of the most overused bundles seem to have been generalized by the learners to fit into contexts where native speakers rarely use them; these can be described as ‘phraseological teddy bears’. Pedagogical applications of the results should start from the underused items in order to broaden the phraseological repertoire of the learners.
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Hasselgård, Hilde & Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell
(2018).
At the interface between Contrastive Analysis and
Learner Corpus Research: A parallel contrastive
approach.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES).
ISSN 1502-7694.
17(2),
p. 182–214.
doi:
10.35360/njes.438.
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This paper presents a model for combining contrastive analysis and interlanguage analysis. It can be seen as an extension of Granger’s (1996) Integrated Contrastive
Model, but it explicitly requires a bidirectional parallel corpus for the contrastive analysis and matching learner corpora for the (multiple) interlanguage analysis. Thus, the model operates at the interface between Contrastive Analysis and Learner Corpus Research.
Within the model, the contrastive, cross-linguistic analysis produces hypotheses for learner behaviour in the languages examined. Hence the learner corpus study of L2 data includes a cross-linguistic interlanguage analysis, based on comparable data produced by (at least) two learner groups (with different L1s and different L2s). As an illustration of the model, the English noun people and its typical Norwegian translation correspondences (FOLK and MENNESKE) are studied, with particular attention to postmodification patterns. The proposed Parallel Contrastive Model is shown to have the potential to throw new light on the cross-linguistic relationship between languages and interlanguages in a common framework.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2018).
Language Contrasts, Language Learners and Metacognition: Focus on Norwegian Advanced Learners of English.
In Haukås, Åsta; Bjørke, Camilla & Dypedahl, Magne (Ed.),
Metacognition in Language Learning and Teaching.
Routledge.
ISSN 9781138633384.
doi:
10.4324/9781351049146-6.
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This chapter discusses metacognitive cross-linguistic awareness in language learning with a focus on Norwegian advanced learners of English. It is argued that even rather proficient language learners can benefit from explicit knowledge of differences and similarities between their first language and their second, exploiting the potential for positive transfer and avoiding negative transfer. Three small-scale studies illustrate language contrasts and learner behaviour in the use of modal auxiliaries, modal combinations, and topic identifiers. A parallel corpus is consulted to uncover differences between English and Norwegian before corpora of Norwegian-produced L2 English and novice L1 English are explored to find out whether the cross-linguistic differences are reflected in the learner output. In a complementary investigation, a group of university students express their views on the value of L1/L2 comparisons in L2 learning. The predominant attitude is that knowledge of similarities and differences between the languages is beneficial, although linguistic self-consciousness and hypercorrection may also arise from such knowledge. It is suggested that the corpus techniques illustrated in the chapter may help teachers and learners notice relationships between the L1 and the L2, which in turn may foster cross-linguistic awareness and metacognition.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2018).
Sentence-initial indefinite subjects in English and Norwegian.
Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies (BeLLS).
9(1),
p. 93–114.
doi:
10.15845/bells.v9i1.1506.
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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.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Adverbial Clauses in English and Norwegian Fiction and News.
Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics.
ISSN 2213-6819.
5,
p. 119–139.
doi:
10.1007/978-3-319-54556-1_6.
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This paper considers the placement of adverbial clauses in English and Norwegian with regard to their form, meaning, information status and semantic relation to the matrix clause proposition. The study is based on comparable original
texts in both languages, representing two registers: fiction and news reportage. End position of adverbial clauses is most common in both languages, with initial position as an alternative in many cases. Positional freedom is found to differ greatly between finite and non-finite clauses, and also across different semantic types of adverbial clauses. For those types of adverbial clauses that vary across positions, mostly time and contingency clauses, information status (new vs. anchored) is found to have some influence. Iconic order was found to be less important, but was more noticeable in fiction than in news. The placement of adverbial clauses seems to be guided by similar principles in both languages. Register differences are identified in both languages, but they do not show consistent patterns.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Lexical patterns of place in English and Norwegian.
In Egan, Thomas Laurence & Dirdal, Hildegunn (Ed.),
Cross-linguistic Correspondences. From lexis to genre.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ISSN 9789027259561.
p. 98–119.
doi:
10.1075/slcs.191.04has.
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This paper presents a contrastive analysis of the English noun place and the corresponding Norwegian nouns plass and sted. The study involves two stages. First the patterns of cross-linguistic correspondences of the nouns are established by means of translational data from the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus. The correspondence patterns reveal both differences and commonalities between the words. Secondly, recurrent lexical bundles involving place, sted, and plass are investigated in order to discover their selectional preferences. The combined approach to the meanings and usage patterns of the words show the two Norwegian nouns to be almost in complementary distribution in many of their patterns. Place is broader in its meaning and shares senses and uses with both of the Norwegian nouns, although in certain contexts sted/plass correspond to different nouns (e.g. room or space), or to adverbs in -where. Certain idiomatic expressions are similar across the languages, but non-literal uses typically do not correspond to a spatial expression in the other language.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Temporal Expressions in English and Norwegian.
In Janebová, Marketá; Lapshinova-Koltunski, Ekaterina & Martinková, Michaela (Ed.),
Contrasting English and Other Languages through Corpora.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
ISSN 9781443896016.
p. 75–101.
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This study employs the n-gram method of data extraction to investigate temporal expressions in English and Norwegian. An aim is to find out what kinds of structures are used for expressing time in both languages, and more specifically, whether English uses more nominal expressions than Norwegian. Another aim is to test the n-gram methodology for cross-linguistic comparison within a specified semantic domain. The data comes from the fiction component of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. Temporal n-grams are manually identified from bootstrapped lists of 2-4-grams in both languages, and these are further analysed in terms of their structure and function. Results are, however, inconclusive, not least due to systemic morphological and syntactic differences between the languages that influence recurrence. Norwegian is found to be less recurrent (i.e. have fewer frequent n-grams) than English, but a greater proportion of Norwegian n-grams are temporal. While the question of nominal vs. adverbial expressions could not be resolved, it was found that Norwegian has more clausal n-grams than English. Further research, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, and preferably larger corpora, is needed in order to achieve a more reliable comparison of temporal expressions in English and Norwegian.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Stating the obvious: signals of shared knowledge in Norwegian-produced academic English.
In Haan, Pieter de; Vries, Rina De & Vuuren, Sanne Van (Ed.),
Language, Learners and Levels: Progression and Variation..
Presses universitaires de Louvain.
ISSN 9782875585950.
p. 23–44.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2016).
The way of the world: The colligational framework “the
N1 of the N2” and its Norwegian correspondences.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES).
ISSN 1502-7694.
15(3),
p. 55–79.
doi:
10.35360/njes.376.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2016).
Conditional clauses in novice academic English: A comparison of Norwegian learners and native speakers.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES).
ISSN 1502-7694.
15(2),
p. 95–112.
doi:
10.35360/njes.364.
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This study concerns the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of conditional clauses in novice academic English. The material comes from the VESPA corpus, representing Norwegian advanced learners of English, and the BAWE corpus, representing English L1 students in British universities. The learners are shown to overuse conditionals in general, but to mostly master their syntactic and semantic features. The overuse may be associated with the interpersonal functions of conditionals. The epistemic use in argument building is more apparent among the native speakers.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2016).
Discourse-organizing metadiscourse in novice academic English.
In Lopez-Couso, Maria Jose; Méndez-Naya, Belén; Núñez-Pertejo, Paloma & Palacios-Martínez, Ignacio M. (Ed.),
Corpus linguistics on the move: Exploring and understanding English through corpora..
De Gruyter Brill.
ISSN 9789004308077.
p. 106–131.
doi:
10.1163/9789004321342_007.
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Aijmer, Karin & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2015).
Cross-linguistic studies at the interface between lexis and grammar.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES).
ISSN 1502-7694.
14(1),
p. 1–8.
doi:
10.35360/njes.337.
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Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2015).
Learners' and native speakers' use of recurrent word-combinations across disciplines.
Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies (BeLLS).
6,
p. 87–106.
doi:
10.15845/bells.v6i0.810.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2015).
Coming and going to the future: Future-referring expressions in English and Norwegian.
In Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde (Ed.),
Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Verb Constructions.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
ISSN 9781443878081.
p. 88–115.
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This study compares two future-referring expressions in English and Norwegian that are composed of a verb of motion and an infinitive, viz. 'be going to V' and 'komme til å V'. The meanings of the constructions are studied through the lens of their correspondences in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), which reveals some important differences. The constructions also differ in frequency of use and to some extent in their collocational preferences.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2015).
Lexicogrammatical features of adverbs in advanced learner English.
ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics.
ISSN 0019-0829.
166(1),
p. 163–189.
doi:
10.1075/itl.166.1.05has.
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This paper explores the use of -ly adverbs by Norwegian advanced learners of English compared to that of native speakers. The investigation is based on two corpora of novice academic English: VESPA and BAWE. It considers features of lexis (frequencies, style, meanings, collocational patterns) as well as of syntax, i.e. whether the adverbs function as adjuncts, disjuncts, conjuncts or modifiers in adjective or adverb phrases. The learners make few clear mistakes with adverbs, but there are important frequency differences between the corpora concerning lexical choice and semantic and syntactic functions. Learners overuse adverbs with modal meaning but underuse phrase-modifying adverbs. Most adjunct types are also underused. At several points, the native speakers prove to have a greater lexical repertoire.
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Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2015).
Cross-linguistic perspectives on verb constructions.
In Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde (Ed.),
Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Verb Constructions.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
ISSN 9781443878081.
p. 1–6.
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This volume sheds new light on verb constructions by exposing them to cross-linguistic analysis based on multilingual corpora. It is composed of nine studies which provide insights into various aspects of cross-linguistic diversity, including showing that seemingly equivalent verb constructions may differ in their semantics, and that similar meanings may be expressed by different types of constructions. In other words, this book shows that different languages have different ways of lexicalising verb-based meanings, most notably by means of other, divergent verb constructions.
A range of lexicogrammatical aspects of verb constructions are explored throughout the book, including time reference; modality; voice; light verb constructions; non-finite complementation of lexical verbs; posture-verb constructions; semiperiphrastic constructions; and the construction and semantic composition of verbs of putting. All of the contributions consider English in comparison with at least one of the following languages: Czech, German, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.
As such, this volume offers a truly multilingual perspective on verb constructions. The diversity of comparisons also highlights the multi-faceted nature of the verb phrase, which seems to have virtually limitless potential for exploration in the fields of tense, aspect, modality, lexical semantics, syntax, and phraseology.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2014).
Discourse-structuring functions of initial adverbials in English and Norwegian news and fiction.
Languages in Contrast: International Journal for Contrastive Linguistics.
ISSN 1387-6759.
14(1),
p. 73–92.
doi:
10.1075/lic.14.1.05has.
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This paper explores the discourse-structuring functions of initial adverbial adjuncts in English and Norwegian news and fiction. Such discourse functions have to do with discourse linking and information management. The corpus study reveals frequency differences in the use of initial adjuncts across the languages, which are to some extent connected with an overall greater frequency of adjuncts in Norwegian. While initial adjuncts in fiction often signal cohesive relations, those in news are more typically due to backgrounding of less important information or to framing/scene-setting for the clause message. Norwegian initial adjuncts are even less likely than English ones to convey new information; on the other hand, initial position is to a lesser extent associated with contrastive focus in Norwegian. This, together with the higher frequency of initial adjuncts in Norwegian, suggests that initial placement of adjuncts carries a lower degree of markedness in Norwegian than in English.
Keywords: discourse organization, English/Norwegian, cohesion, theme, adverbials
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2014).
Verbal and nominal expressions in an English-Norwegian translation perspective.
In Kuntz, Kerstin; Teich, Elke; Hansen-Schirra, Silvia; Neumann, Stella & Daut, Peggy (Ed.),
Caught in the Middle – Language Use and Translation. A Festschrift for Erich Steiner on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday.
Universitätsverlag des Saarlandes.
ISSN 9783862231454.
p. 147–160.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2014).
Conditional clauses in English and Norwegian.
In Helland, Hans Petter & Salvesen, Christine Meklenborg (Ed.),
Affaire(s) de grammaire. Mélanges offerts à Marianne Hobæk Haff à l'occasion de ses soixante-cinq ans.
Novus Forlag.
ISSN 9788270997534.
p. 185–204.
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Dypedahl, Magne & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2025).
Introducing English Grammar, fourth edition.
Fagbokforlaget.
ISBN 9788245058109.
260 p.
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Introducing English Grammar describes and explains English grammar in light of current usage. It is aimed at students of English who take an introductory course in English grammar at college/university level in Norway, including teacher education.
The fourth edition of Introducing English Grammar has been thoroughly revised and updated, but retains the key points of the previous edition:
alerting readers to the close ties between grammatical form, meaning and communicative function
providing learners with good tools for improving their English
summing up main points and giving practical advice through “Points to remember”
introducing students to grammatical terminology so that they can make use of grammar information from dictionaries and other sources
introducing the basic clause structure of English
comparing English with Norwegian in order to address specific learner problems and increase the students’ language awareness
presenting ways of creating coherent texts that are adapted to context and purpose
creating a foundation for further study of English language and linguistics
providing exercises focusing on practical as well as analytical skills
The book has an accompanying website with a key to the exercises as well as corpus-related exercises for each chapter.
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Burgess, Richard; Dypedahl, Magne & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2022).
Interactions 2 (Lærebok Programfag Engelsk 2).
Cappelen Damm AS.
ISBN 9788202740962.
424 p.
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Interactions 2 er skrevet og strukturert for å gi elevene gode verktøy i arbeidet med å utvikle seg til å bli bevisste, kritiske og deltakende samfunnsborgere, og for å forberede dem på videre studier. Den vil øve elevene i selvstendig refleksjon, kritisk tenking og drøfting av tekster, som er sentrale elementer i faget Engelsk 2, LK20.
Interactions 2 lærebok i kombinasjon med tilhørende digitale ressurser gir gode muligheter for å lykkes med Engelsk 2.
https://www.cappelendammundervisning.no/_interactions-2-lk20-9788202740962
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Čermáková, Anna; Egan, Thomas Laurence; Hasselgård, Hilde & Rørvik, Sylvi
(2021).
Time in Languages, Languages in Time.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ISBN 9789027209689.
307 p.
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This volume comprises a collection of contrastive studies on language and time. Languages represented include Czech, French, German, Mandarin, Norwegian and Swedish, all of which are contrasted with English. While the amount of published research on temporal relations in general is considerable, less work has been carried out on comparing how we talk about time in various languages and how languages change over time. Several methodological challenges are addressed and solutions proposed, such as how to deal with poor quality historical data and how to identify n-grams in typologically different languages for purposes of comparison. The results of the various studies show how multilingual corpora can increase our knowledge of language-specific features as well as linguistic, typological and cultural differences and similarities across languages.
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Dypedahl, Magne & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2018).
Introducing English Grammar. Third Edition.
Fagbokforlaget.
ISBN 9788245023688.
256 p.
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Introducing English Grammar describes and explains English grammar in light of current usage. It is aimed at students of English in teacher education and students who take an introductory course in English grammar at college/university level in Norway.
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Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2015).
Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Verb Constructions.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
ISBN 9781443878081.
266 p.
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Show summary
This volume sheds new light on verb constructions by exposing them to cross-linguistic analysis based on multilingual corpora. It is composed of nine studies which provide insights into various aspects of cross-linguistic diversity, including showing that seemingly equivalent verb constructions may differ in their semantics, and that similar meanings may be expressed by different types of constructions. In other words, this book shows that different languages have different ways of lexicalising verb-based meanings, most notably by means of other, divergent verb constructions.
A range of lexicogrammatical aspects of verb constructions are explored throughout the book, including time reference; modality; voice; light verb constructions; non-finite complementation of lexical verbs; posture-verb constructions; semiperiphrastic constructions; and the construction and semantic composition of verbs of putting. All of the contributions consider English in comparison with at least one of the following languages: Czech, German, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.
As such, this volume offers a truly multilingual perspective on verb constructions. The diversity of comparisons also highlights the multi-faceted nature of the verb phrase, which seems to have virtually limitless potential for exploration in the fields of tense, aspect, modality, lexical semantics, syntax, and phraseology.
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Hasselgård, Hilde; Llewellyn, Sophie Emma Sian; Kaatari, Henrik & Sundqvist, Pia
(2026).
Extramural English and vocabulary use: Keywords and collocations in the Norwegian Learner English Corpus.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2025).
Verbal expressions of habituality in English and Norwegian: Forms and correspondences.
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Habitual expressions “describe a situation which is characteristic of an extended period of time, so extended in fact that the situation referred to is viewed not as an incidental property of the moment but, precisely, as a characteristic feature of a whole period” (Comrie 1976: 27-28). While there is no fully grammaticalized habitual aspect in verb systems of English and Norwegian, both languages have periphrastic expressions of habitual meaning as defined above. Examples are used to, tend to (I used to help him out / This tends to work well) and pleie, bruke (Faren pleide å gi ham en bok… – His father used to give him a book…). Besides catenative expressions, modal auxiliaries (e.g. English would, Norwegian kunne) and
complement clause constructions can express habituality, e.g. Norwegian det hender at ‘it happens that’ and English be known to. Previous comparisons of English and Norwegian have focused on a single expression of habituality and its correspondences, e.g. Bjerga (1998), who studied Norwegian pleie and its English correspondences, and Johansson’s (2005) examination of det hender at ‘it happens that’. Lund (2007) investigated whether used to could always be translated by pleie. These studies found that habitual expressions are rarely translated congruently between English and Norwegian. Similarly, Altenberg (2007) found low mutual correspondence between English used to and Swedish bruka.
The present study considers verbal expressions of habituality in both Norwegian and English and their correspondences. The material comes from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus, in which the following expressions have been searched for in original texts: the habitual catenatives pleie and bruke + infinitive and the English expressions used to, tend to, be known to and would. The aims are the following: to compare the use and distribution of habituality expressions within and between the languages; to survey the range of translation correspondences of each expression; and to identify potential factors influencing the choice of correspondence.
Preliminary results show that pleie far outnumbers bruke in Norwegian originals. In English would is most frequent, followed by used to, tend to and be known to. In sum, the English habituals are more frequent than the Norwegian ones. Recurrent noncongruent correspondences include adverbials, e.g. usually, sometimes, alltid (‘always’) før (‘before’). This aligns with Altenberg’s (2007) results, and was also apparent in Hasselgård (2007), in which usuality adverbials sometimes corresponded to verbal expressions. Furthermore, translations into both languages frequently omit the habituality marker and use a simple tense instead, and Norwegian may use the perfect aspect to mark anteriority. Altenberg (2007) shows that
co-occurring time adverbials and the tense and dynamicity of the verb phrase influence the choice of translation between English and Swedish. These factors will also be examined in the proposed study, which in addition aspires to build on and connect the findings of the previous studies and to identify a possible division of labour between verbal, adverbial and other expressions of habituality in both languages examined.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2025).
Grammar: Overview.
In Chapelle, Carol A. (Eds.),
The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics.
John Wiley & Sons.
ISSN 9781405198431.
doi:
10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1342.pub2.
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Abstract This entry gives an overview of the Grammar section of the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. It discusses the role of grammar and grammatical analysis in applied linguistics under five main headings: Models of Grammar, Features of Grammar, Variation in Grammar, Grammar in Use, and Grammar and Language Learning. The final section points to connections between the Grammar section and related content in other sections, for example, Corpus Linguistics and Language for Specific Purposes. The entries presented under each heading contribute to a wide perspective on the uses and functions of grammatical structures in context and underline the importance of grammatical analysis and grammatical awareness in the description of language use.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2025).
English language and linguistics at university level in Scandinavia: what and why?
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Research and teaching within English language and linguistics in Scandinavia are facing a number of challenges. Some of these are familiar, for example defining what characterizes English linguistics as distinct from general linguistics, and whether our location in Scandinavia makes a difference for what we focus on in our teaching and research. More recent challenges, for teaching as well as research, come from AI-generated language. My own perspective is that of an applied corpus linguist focusing on contrastive analysis and learner corpus research. I will give some examples of how this perspective can be useful in both research and teaching, as well as a point of reference for comparison with AI-generated text. I will end by discussing some of the opportunities for English linguists in Scandinavia today and possibly in the future.
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Hasselgård, Hilde; Čermáková, Anna; Malà, Markéta & Šebestová, Denisa
(2024).
Introduction.
In Čermáková, Anna; Hasselgård, Hilde; Malà, Markéta & Šebestová, Denisa (Ed.),
Contrastive Corpus Linguistics. Patterns in Lexicogrammar and Discourse.
Bloomsbury Academic.
ISSN 9781350385931.
p. 1–10.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2024).
Temporal catenatives in English and Norwegian: Fiction, “non-fiction” and academic prose.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2023).
Corpus-based contrastive grammar studies: Some challenges and insights from crosslinguistic studies of adverbials.
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Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2023).
Going places: English go and Norwegian gå – mutual correspondence and textual variation.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2021).
'Seem' and 'appear' and their Norwegian verbal counterparts: a cross-register contrastive study.
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Čermáková, Anna; Egan, Thomas Laurence; Hasselgård, Hilde & Rørvik, Sylvi
(2021).
Time in languages, languages in time.
In Čermáková, Anna; Egan, Thomas Laurence; Hasselgård, Hilde & Rørvik, Sylvi (Ed.),
Time in Languages, Languages in Time.
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ISSN 9789027209689.
p. 1–8.
doi:
10.1075/scl.101.01cer.
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This volume comprises a collection of contrastive studies on language and time. Languages represented include Czech, French, German, Mandarin, Norwegian and Swedish, all of which are contrasted with English. While the amount of published research on temporal relations in general is considerable, less work has been carried out on comparing how we talk about time in various languages and how languages change over time. Several methodological challenges are addressed and solutions proposed, such as how to deal with poor quality historical data and how to identify n-grams in typologically different languages for purposes of comparison. The results of the various studies show how multilingual corpora can increase our knowledge of language-specific features as well as linguistic, typological and cultural differences and similarities across languages.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2020).
Lexicogrammar Through Colligation: Noun + Preposition in English and Norwegian.
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This study uses sequences of PoS tags as a window into cross-linguistic syntactic differences. The selected tag sequence is noun plus preposition, most frequently realizing either noun with postmodifying PP or chance sequences of noun + PP with adverbial function, illustrated by (1) and (2) from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) on which this study is based. Both examples have congruent translations, indicating potential similarity between English and Norwegian PPs.
Nor did he enjoy his meetings with Dr Forestier… (BC1)
Han likte heller ikke konsultasjonene hos doktor Forestier …
Og han hadde lagt klærne på en stein mye lenger opp. (HW2)
And he had laid his clothes on a rock much nearer the grove.
The research questions are as follows:
What are the syntactic functions of PPs following a noun in Norwegian and English?
What meanings do the PPs convey?
Are there quantitative and qualitative differences between the languages?
To what extent are translations congruent?
English is expected to have more postmodifying PPs and Norwegian to have more adverbial PPs. This is based on a study of postmodifying of-phrases and their (frequently non-congruent) Norwegian correspondences (Hasselgård 2016). Furthermore, the claim that English is more nominal while Norwegian is more verbal/sentential (e.g. Nordrum 2007, Behrens 2014), might promote postmodifying PPs in English and clause-level adverbials in Norwegian.
A novelty of this study is its use of tag sequences as a starting point for the investigation, which has not been common in cross-linguistic corpus studies (though see Wilhelmsen 2019 and monolingual studies of L1 and L2 performance, e.g. Granger & Rayson 1998, Granger & Bestgen 2014).
Considering the high numbers of noun+preposition sequences in the ENPC and the need for manual post-processing of the data, random samples of 500 from either language were extracted through the Glossa search interface. As expected, the most important functions of the PPs were postmodifier and adverbial. The languages differ: in English the number of postmodifiers is about twice that of adverbials, but in Norwegian the number of adverbials is very close to that of postmodifiers. Other, infrequent, syntactic functions include complex prepositions and multi-word verbs not recognized by the tagger as such (e.g. in front of, legge merke til ‘make note of’). In addition there were some tagging errors concerning both nouns and prepositions.
Locative meanings are more frequent in Norwegian than in English in both adverbial and postmodifiying PPs. English has more PPs modifying support nouns (Sinclair 1991) and PPs in possessive constructions. Larger proportions of the English adverbials have temporal and manner meanings. Other meanings are more similarly distributed.
The degree of congruence in translation varies across translation directions and syntactic functions. Adverbials are translated congruently in 75-80% of the cases in both directions. Translations of postmodifiers are congruent more often from Norwegian to English (c. 75%) than from English to Norwegian (c. 55%). This indicates greater cross-linguistic differences in postmodifying than adverbial PPs.
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Hasund, Ingrid Kristine & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2019).
Writer/reader visibility in young learner writing. A study of the TRAWL corpus of secondary school texts.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2019).
Stating the obvious: signals of shared knowledge in academic English by advanced learners.
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Xu, Xiuling & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2018).
An Interview with Hilde Hasselgård.
[Journal].
Corpus Linguistics.
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http://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=CJFD&filename=YLYY201802001&dbname=CJFDLASN2019
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2018).
"The nature of the essays". The colligational pattern ‘the N of the N’ in L1 and L2 academic English.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2018).
Når det gjelder tema: Topikmarkører i norske og engelske akademiske tekster.
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Foredraget handler om en spesiell type setningstemaer, nemlig de som innledes med uttrykk som når det gjelder, med hensyn til, i forhold til, som illustrert i (1) og (2). Slike uttrykk markerer det eksperiensielle temaet eksplisitt, og jeg vil derfor bruke termen topikmarkør om dem.
1. Når det gjelder ordfølgen i Holbergs prosa, finner vi både direkte og invertert ordstilling godt belagt, … (KIAP-NO)
2. I forhold til den fullstendige, dynamiske relasjonen kan (3.1) da sies å lide av utelatte variabler. (KIAP-NO)
Halliday nevner så vidt slike uttrykk i forbindelse med identifisering av topik når han skriver at eksperiensielt tema noen ganger blir annonsert eksplisitt ved hjelp av uttrykk som as for, with regard to (1994, 39). Syntaktisk sett er slike temaer adjunkter (av typen ‘matter’/‘sak’), og derfor markerte. Markeringen er både syntaktiskog tekstuell: topikmarkørene fremhever setningens tema og i tillegg at temaet er nytt eller innebærer en kontrast til, eller fortsettelse av, den foregående konteksten.
Eksempel (3) og (4) viser to engelske setninger med topikmarkører. I foredraget vil jeg se nærmere på distribusjonen og funksjonen til disse markørene i både norsk og engelsk.
3. In terms of ESL materials, there is still not yet a book available on thesis and dissertation writing… (KIAP-ENG)
4. In the case of New Zealand, this stage would have lasted until approximately 1860. (KIAP-ENG)
Tidligere studier jeg har gjort antyder at tematiske saksadjunkter, og dermed topikmarkører, er mer vanlige på norsk enn på engelsk – i alle fall bruker norske studenter dem mer enn britiske studenter i sine akademiske tekster på engelsk (Hasselgård, under utgivelse a og b). For å undersøke fenomenet nærmere, bruker jeg to korpuser: Engelsk-norsk parallellkorpus (ENPC), som inneholder originaltekster og oversettelser på både engelsk og norsk, og KIAP-korpuset, som inneholder akademiske artikler på engelsk og norsk innen lingvistikk, medisin og økonomi. Førstnevnte brukes for å etablere et sett av tilsvarende topikmarkører på norsk og engelsk. De mest frekvente markørene danner grunnlag for den egentlige undersøkelsen, hvor jeg ser på hvordan disse brukes i akademiske artikler på engelsk og norsk. Problemstillingene er følgende:
Hvor frekvente er topikmarkører i engelske og norske akademiske tekster?
Er det forskjeller mellom disiplinene i hvilke uttrykk som blir brukt?
Hva er de tektstuelle funksjonen(e) til saksadjunktene som fungerer som markert tema? Hva slags likheter og forskjeller finnes det mellom språk og mellom disipliner?
LITTERATUR
Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.
Hasselgård, Hilde (under utgivelse). Phraseological teddy bears: frequent lexical bundles in academic writing by Norwegian learners and native speakers of English. Kommer i M. Mahlberg & V. Wiegand (red.), Corpus Linguistics, Context and Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Hasselgård, Hilde (2018). Language contrasts, language learners, and metacognition. I Å. Haukås, C. Bjørke and M. Dypedahl (red.), Metacognition in Language Learning and Teaching. Routledge.
KORPUSMATERIALE
Engelsk-norsk parallellkorpus: http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/tjenester/kunnskap/sprak/omc/enpc/
KIAP-korpuset: http://www.uib.no/fremmedsprak/23107/kiap-korpuset
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Learner Corpus Research. What corpora can tell us about learner language, with special reference to some phraseological issues.
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Hasselgård, Hilde & Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell
(2017).
The interfaces between LCR and contrastive analysis. A parallel contrastive experiment.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Å bruke korpus i engelskundervisningen - og om hva korpus kan fortelle oss om engelsklæring.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Phraseological teddy bears: Lexical bundles in academic writing by Norwegian learners and native speakers of English.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Idiomaticity in English and Norwegian: combining contrastive and interlanguage corpus studies.
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I will present some features of the project “Idiomaticity in English and Norwegian – A corpus-based approach”, discussing benefits as well as challenges of combining contrastive analysis with learner language analysis, as in the Integrated Contrastive Model (Granger 1996, Gilquin 2000/2001). Much previous contrastive and interlanguage research deals with individual lexemes or grammatical constructions. In contrast, the Idiomaticity project focuses on lexicogrammatical patterns, as phraseology is expected to (and to some extent has been shown to) vary across both languages and proficiency levels. I will further discuss the usefulness – and the feasibility – of adding a register dimension to the comparison. Finally I will show a case study, starting from the relatively frequent English 4-gram in the case of as an illustration of how the model can work.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2017).
Writing different types of texts with structure and coherence suited to the purpose and situation.
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Nordrum, Lene; Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Hasselgård, Hilde
(2016).
Introduction - Languages in contrast 20 years on.
Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES).
ISSN 1502-7694.
15(3),
p. 1–6.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2016).
Å si det selvsagte: engasjementsmarkører i norske studenters akademiske tekster på engelsk.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2016).
Maria Leedham, Chinese Students Writing in English. Implications from a Corpus-Driven Study (Book review).
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research.
ISSN 2215-1478.
2(1),
p. 120–124.
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Hasselgård, Hilde & Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell
(2015).
The Norwegian component of the VESPA corpus – compilation, annotation and use.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2015).
English-Norwegian contrasts and learner English.
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The main subject area “Language learning” in the curriculum for English states that learners should be able to see “relationships between English, one's native language and other languages”, presumably to facilitate English language learning. I will look into some areas where Norwegian and English are different and discuss how awareness of such differences can be beneficial to learners. Arguably, if knowledge about relationships between languages is to work as a strategy for learning English, learners need to be aware of relationships between linguistic forms and their meanings and functions.
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Hasselgård, Hilde
(2014).
The way of the world: the collocational framework “the N1 of the N2” and its Norwegian correspondences.
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Published
Sep. 23, 2010 12:00 PM
- Last modified
June 17, 2026 12:26 PM