Øyvind Thormodsæter

• Thormodsæter, Øyvind (2021). The idiomaticity of emotion in English and Norwegian: A corpus-based contrastive investigation of the phraseology of the three English-Norwegian verb pairs enjoy-nyte, love-elske and like-like.. Show summary

  Expressing feelings is a part of our everyday human experience, yet, describing our emotions accurately can be challenging, as it requires not only the ability to encode or decode the meaning of words and phrases, but also knowledge about the unwritten social codes and cultural norms that govern the use of such expressions. Expressing feelings accurately in a foreign language is therefore doubly demanding, since the speaker may be influenced by the codes and norms of their own speech community, as well as the lexicon and grammar of their first language. The current study reports on a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the phraseology of the three English-Norwegian emotion verb pairs enjoy-nyte, love-elske and like-like, as well as the level of correspondence between the English and Norwegian verbs. Furthermore, it investigates differences and similarities between English native and Norwegian learner use of the English verbs, and discusses whether any differences found are likely to be tied to the cross-linguistic differences between the English and Norwegian verbs. The analysis showed that the Norwegian member of each pair more consistently expresses a strong(er) emotion than the English one, that elske and love both seem to be used more and more frequently in a delexicalised sense with non-personal direct objects, and that while like and like are cross-linguistically quite similar, enjoy and nyte have markedly different lexicogrammatical features. These and other cross-linguistic differences are corroborated by differences between Norwegian learner and English native speaker use of the English verbs, e.g. overuse of amplifiers, use of stronger amplifiers, overuse of syntactic patterns favoured by the Norwegian verbs, e.g. V + Infinitive, and underuse or unidiomatic use of patterns with no lexicogrammatically congruent pattern in Norwegian, such as Would like/love to, the X enjoyed by X or enjoy oneself.

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