Past activities

ELC/CLG backlist

Activities spring 2023

17 January: Delia Schipor

Historical multilingualism and English didactics – bridging the gap

Delia Schipor, University of South-Eastern Norway

Is research in English historical linguistics and, more specifically, historical multilingualism in England relevant for teaching English in Norway? Could insights from historical texts be employed to address the needs of multilingual learners? If so, why, and in which ways could historical multilingualism inform the field of English didactics? In this talk, I will try to discuss these questions, guided by insights from research on historical multilingualism and the 2020 national curriculum for English. The first part of my talk is concerned with multilingual practices and the status of English in documentary texts from the Hampshire Record Office, dated to 1400-1525. This will provide a diachronic overview of the distribution of English, French, and Latin in the material, with examples of multiple language use from various text types. The second part of my talk will explore two main pathways for bridging the gap between historical multilingualism and English didactics. First, teacher-mediated encounters with historical texts in the English classroom may be beneficial for developing intercultural competence and fostering metalinguistic awareness, which are essential aims in the 2020 curriculum for English. Second, a multilingual approach in the English classroom may be successfully informed by findings from historical multilingualism. For example, investigating multiple language use in historical texts may serve both to deconstruct monolingual language ideologies and to encourage the use of learners’ entire range of linguistic repertoires in written texts.

28 February: Barry Kavanagh

How Corpora Can Be Useful in English Language Teaching in Norwegian Schools

Barry Kavanagh, Høgskolen i Innlandet and the University of Oslo

Ph.D. research, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. Article-based dissertation about connecting direct pedagogical applications of corpora to English language teaching practice.

‘Bridging the Gap from the Other Side: How Corpora Are Used by English Teachers in Norwegian Schools’ surveys English teachers nationally (34 out of 210 teachers have done some work with corpora), following up with interviews (three corpus-using teachers).

‘Norwegian in-service teachers’ perspectives on language corpora in teaching English’ interviews four teachers introduced to corpora through seminars integrated into a language course for in-service teachers. They found corpora useful for vocabulary, and perceived these challenges: usability, lack of teacher IT skills, pupil-corpus interaction challenges (complexity of software and concordance lines; uninterest in language), and lack of teacher need (language mistakes ‘obvious’ to teachers of the lower years).

‘“The image of Chantal vanished instantly as though someone had thrown a switch”: Corpus Exercises for Lower Secondary English’ creates corpus exercises, influenced by how teachers use corpora (article 1) and teacher perspectives on corpora (article 2). Corpus exercises relate to 2020 curriculum concepts: knowledge of English as a system, in-depth learning, critical thinking, and digital skills.

29 March: Alexandra Spalek

Figurative verb polysemy is driven differentially by grammar and conceptual content: Evidence from cross-linguistic data

Alexandra Spalek, University of Oslo, and Louise McNally, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Figurative polysemy, in which a word’s original meaning is extended into domains for which it did not originally apply, is a pervasive property of the creativity of human language. We argue, using cross-linguistic (English/Spanish) data, that we can explain similarities and differences in patterns of figurative verb polysemy in the two languages by distinguishing whether the polysemy is anchored in grammar (e.g. the event-structure of the verb) or in conceptual (or “root”) content. We begin with the case study of English sweep and Spanish barrer. Though listed as equivalents in the IDS database (Key & Comrie 2015), sweep is an activity verb (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1991), while barrer describes a complex telic event (Auza & Maldonado 2005). As conceptual counterparts, they share various patterns of figurative extension (e.g., describing overwhelming victory or severe weather); we show that the differences in event structure also correlate with subtle differences in figurative senses.

A contrasting case study is provided by tear and rasgar, which share event structure but differ in fine details of conceptual content. Both verbs denote comparable changes of state resulting in some loss of integrity via separation; however, they diverge significantly in their semantic restrictions on the affected object. Rasgar is restricted to destruction of unsubstantial materials, excluding, e.g. thick substances (??rasgar pan ‘tear bread’). Tear is not so restricted, and (perhaps relatedly) further implies that the separation involves force in opposing directions. These differences are clearly traceable in figurative meanings: While both verbs can describe figurative separation/destruction, only tear allows figurative extensions exploiting force in opposed directions, for example to describe contrary feelings.

A full understanding of cross-linguistic variation in creative language use, such as figurative verbal polysemy, entails understanding how grammatically-encoded content interacts with content that is not specifically linked to grammar. The success of our account in shedding new light on figurative polysemy thus highlights the importance of treating the two types of semantic content as distinct, if related.

References

Auza, A. & R. Maldonado (2005). Determinantes aspectuales en la adquisición verbal, el caso de los nombres de oficio. M. Lubbers Quesada & R. Maldonado (eds.), Dimensiones del aspecto en español. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 245–274.

Key, M.R., & B. Comrie (eds.) (2015). The Intercontinental Dictionary Series. https://ids.clld.org/.

Levin, B. & M. Rappaport Hovav (1991). Wiping the slate clean: A lexical semantic exploration. Cognition 41, 123–151.

25 April: Kaja Evang, Mathias Russnes (two separate talks)

Noun phrase modification in young learner writing – a contrastive approach

Kaja Evang, University of Oslo

Syntactic complexity in the form of pre- and post-modification of noun phrases have been shown to be a staple feature of mature academic writing. The development of phrasal modification has been widely studied in novice academic writing, but not as extensively at lower levels of education. The present study explores noun phrase modification in secondary students’ writing in a contrastive perspective, asking the following research questions:

1. How do Norwegian students modify noun phrases in their writing in their final year of lower secondary school?

2. Do their modifications differ in Norwegian (L1) versus English (L2)?

The case study is performed on approximately 60 texts in Norwegian and English by four students from the 10th grade subset of the MULTIWRITE project corpus – a sub-corpus containing the writing produced by 120 students throughout 10th grade in Norwegian bokmål, Norwegian nynorsk, English, and Spanish/German. Combining POS-tagging and automated chunking with manual analysis, noun phrase modification in the ~60 texts are sorted into categories following Biber et al. 2011, Parkinson & Musgrave 2014, and Rørvik 2022. The results indicate differences between the students’ writing in Norwegian and English, but that these are relative to type of modifier and to the students’ individual writing styles. A difference in complexity is not confirmed. The results illustrate the importance of distinguishing meticulously between modification types, and of considering each student’s writing individually.

Semantic prosody, semantic transfer and semantic change

Matthias Russnes, University of Oslo

Semantic prosody is a relatively new concept that since its emergence in the late 20th century has become established within the field of corpus linguistics (Hunston 2002; Partington 2004; Stubbs 2002). The concept itself is generally ascribed to Sinclair (1996), and is defined as a “consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates” (Louw 1993: 157).

This study investigates semantic prosody in a diachronic perspective. Although prosodies have been shown to change over time (e.g. Morley & Partington, 2009; Smith & Nordquist, 2012), there is no consensus regarding the source of such changes; does a semantic change have to occur first, or is the semantic change, and thereby the prosody, triggered by semantic transfer induced by persistent prosodies over time, as some scholars have claimed (see Stewart, 2010)?

The difficulty of separating the process of semantic transfer from other kinds of linguistic change has previously been emphasised by Helsper & Hoffmann (2016). This talk aims to explore this further through a corpus study of the development of the lemmas FABRICATE, FABRICATION and FABRIC, from the late 15th century to the late 20th century, drawing on material from Early English Books Online (EEBO, 1475-1700), the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET, 1720-1920), and the British National Corpus 1994 (BNC1994, late 20th century).

The results suggest that semantic prosody is related to and can possibly be caused by a diachronic process of semantic transfer, and that this process is related to semantic change. This can be exemplified by FABRICATE, where the following pattern emerges. First, the lemma is used with literal meanings in the sense ‘to construct, manufacture’. Then the lemma is used with new meanings denoting the creation of immaterial objects through metaphorical extension. Over time the metaphorical sense is used more and more frequently in negative contexts, causing the core lexical item to be imbued with negative evaluative meaning by its collocates, until the instances of FABRICATE in these contexts become a new sense, namely to ‘make up; to frame or invent’, distinct and separate from the original sense. This evolution can be seen in examples (1) from 1598, (2) from 1651, and (3) from 1839 respectively:

(1) a very narrow entrance, and somewhat long, whose sides were not walls fabricated by artificial hand, but made of trees by nature (EEBO: A07650)

(2) The most subtle threads of the King, were strong enough sometimes to fabricate toils and nets for his subjects (EEBO: A56284)

(3) Crimes were also fabricated; false accusations were resorted to; and persons were sometimes employed to seduce the unwary into practices with a view to the conviction and the sale of them (CLMET3.1 2_112)

References

Helsper, D. & Hoffmann, S. 2016. A diachronic study of semantic prosody. Paper presented at ICAME 37, Hong Kong

Hunston, S. 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Louw, B. 1993 Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer? The Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies. In M. Baker et al. Text and Technology. In Honour of John Sinclair. John Benjamins Publishing Company

Morley, J. & Partington, A. 2009. A few Frequently Asked Questions about semantic – or evaluative – prosody. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14 (2): 139-158. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Partington, A. 2004. ’Utterly content in each other’s company’: Semantic prosody and semantic preference. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 131-156. John Benjamins Publishing Company

Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2022. Oxford University Press. fabricate, v. : Oxford English Dictionary (uio.no)

Sinclair, J. 1996. “The search for units of meaning”. Reprinted in J. Sinclair & R. Carter (eds.), Trust the Text (2004), pp. 24-48. London: Routledge

Smith, K. A. & Nordquist, D. 2012. A critical and historical investigation into semantic prosody. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 13 (2): 291-312. John Benjamins Publishing Company

Stewart, D. 2010. Semantic Prosody. A Critical Evaluation. New York: Routledge

Stubbs, M. 2002. Words and Phrases. Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

2022

30 August: Monika Kavalir

“The first language in my head”: Student attitudes to English and Slovene

Monika Kavalir, University of Ljubljana

With the global spread of English, especially via online and media content, young people are exposed to it while still acquiring their first language, which not only calls into question distinctions such as English as a first/second/foreign language but means we are faced with new realities in terms of language and identity.

This talk will present an as yet unpublished study of how often and in what situations university students in Slovenia use English, and what attitudes they have towards it compared to Slovene. The results are based on 365 respondents, all students of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, who filled out the online questionnaire.

The analysis compares the responses of three different groups: students of English (N=130), students of Slovene (N=111; L1 in all cases) and students studying neither of the two languages (N=124). The results show that Slovene still dominates in everyday communication, but that English has become an essential skill which goes beyond the traditional function of a foreign language. English primarily replaces Slovene when students consume online content, watch films and series, and listen to music.

Although respondents often point out that they perceive English as a useful means of communication, many already feel it to be an additional first language, with a sizable group reporting a preference for English over Slovene as their intimate language. Plans are currently in the making to extend the study to other European and non-European contexts.

18 October: Karolina Rudnicka

Non-verbal number agreement. Between the distributive plural and singular: exceptions or free variation?

Karolina Rudnicka, University of Gdańsk

The talk focuses on the topic of non-verbal number agreement, i.e. the agreement in number between the (formally or notionally) plural subject of a clause and a nominal clause element in the predicate part of this clause where the agreement may be viewed as an additional signal (and reinforcement) of the connection between them; compare sentences (1) and (2).

(1) 113 of the soldiers lost their lives, more than 100 were injured. (BNC, 1985-1994)

(2) Look at all of the new people that lost their job and (…). (COCA: 2012)

The investigated language variant is contemporary English, which seems to overwhelmingly prefer the distributive plural occurring in a situation where “a set of entities [is] matched individually with individual entities in another set” (Quirk et al. 1985: 768). In sentence (1) we can see a direct correspondence between the number of the subjects and objects. This general tendency is, however, not without exceptions (cf. Sørensen 1985, Dušková et al. 2006), as example (2) shows.

During the talk I will

discuss the scenarios in which the general tendency for the distributive plural is overruled;
present the results of our recent study (Rudnicka & Klégr, accepted) investigating the possibility of the distributive plural and singular cases being in a free variation, defined by defined by Brown & Miller as “variation in which … forms can be used without any contrast or change of meaning” (2013: 170). Sentences exemplifying free variation can be seen in (3) and (4);
propose a new condition for the presence of free variation, namely a similar distribution across different genres.

(3) Those two men lost their lives and according to the Iraqi government so did two others from the Muslim family living nearby. (COCA: 2009)

(4) More than 65 people lost their life after a cruise ship sunk outside of the islands of Paros. (COCA: 2000)

References

Brown, Keith & Miller, Jim. 2013. The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dušková, Libuše, et al. 2006. Mluvnice současné angličtiny na pozadí češtiny [A Grammar of Contemporary English against the Background of Czech]. Praha: Academia.

Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey and Jan Svartvik. 1985. Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Edinburgh: Longman.

Rudnicka Karolina & Klégr Aleš, accepted for publication. Non-verbal plural number agreement. Between the distributive plural and singular: blocking factors and free variation. In Free variation, unexplained variation? Empirical and theoretical approaches to optionality in grammar, Kristin Kopf & Thilo Weber (eds.). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Sørensen, Knud. 1985. The distributive plural and its limits. English Studies 66(4): 338-350.

24 October: Tim Machan (Note: The weekday for this talk is Monday. Time and place: 4:15pm, PAM sem.rom 11)

English Agonistes: Narrative Design and Language History

Tim William Machan, University of Notre Dame

The history of English is not a ready-made thing – it takes shape only through the critical selection of language forms and usages and through the deployment of these in narratives, which might center on aesthetics, periodization, grammatical structure, usage, or social purpose. The last of these is the focus of English Agonistes: how language history, as a means of both semantic communication and communal interaction, can be framed in relation to and further some social objective. This relation may be understood to be causative, resultative, or simply mimetic, and in each case language change, its origins, and its effects require different explanations and different data, producing different implications for society as well as language. Variation and change in the history of a language may thus be treated as reflections of communal organization; or as evidence of a divine plan in human history; or as a means for social engineering; or as the products of moral character. But in every case, social narratives are those that are underwritten by a kind of theocratic linguistics. Topics include the Tower of Babel, language laws, comparative linguistics, and the global spread of English.

31 October: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (Note: The weekday for this talk is Monday. Time and place: 4:15pm, PAM sem.rom 11)

Where do the rules of English come from?

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

Learning English as a foreign or second language inevitably means having to internalise the many rules of this language. But where do these rules come from? And how do they relate to actual usage? In this guest lecture I will try to answer these questions by looking at the final stages of the English standardisation process, codification and prescription, and their typical products, the grammar and the usage guide. The earliest grammars were not usage based, but have their roots in the Latin grammatical tradition. Inevitably, this clashed with actual usage, which often differed from the rules provided by the grammars. Singular they, an alternative to so-called sex-indefinite he, is a good example of such a clash, just like the split infinitive: why would it not be possible to put an adverb in between to and the infinitive? Also, why can’t we use wrote as a past participle form any more, and is it risky to say “I done that” in a job interview? On the one hand, I will show the grammarians at work trying to codify the language, and on the other hand struggling with the ways in which actual usage differed. In the end it fell to the writers of usage guides to try and keep the old rules adhered to.

22 November: Shaojie Zhang

Evaluative-That Patterns: disciplinary variation in academic writing and knowledge construction

Shaojie Zhang, Beijing Normal University

Academic writers are continuously evaluating other scholars' and their own work. This evaluative aspect of meaning has been conducted under a variety of headings and from different perspectives. Labels such as evaluation (Hunston & Su, 2019; Hunston & Thompon, 2000), stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989), appraisal (Martin, 2000), metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005a) have emerged in existing literature in academic writing studies. Substantial efforts have been made to tease out evaluative resources in academic discourse, such as hedging (Hyland, 1998a), reporting verbs and clauses (Charles, 2006a; Marti et al., 2019), stance noun (Jiang & Hyland, 2015). However, despite its importance in academic writing, detailed research on evaluative features at the clause construction level seems surprisingly scant. Particularly lacking and so worth pursuing is research on evaluative that-clause (Hyland & Tse, 2005a, 2005b; Parkinson, 2013a, 2013b).

The that-clause is a powerful linguistic device for writers which enables them to simultaneously package propositions and express stance and attitudes. Hyland & Tse (2005a) name this evaluative that and provide a model which offers a “comprehensive picture of the evaluative property of that construction” (p.44) --- a property less noticed when compared with other lexical stance-taking features such as modal verbs and stance nouns.

The present study adopts a corpus-based approach to investigating evaluative that-patterns in disciplinary backgrounds, drawing on a revised model based on Hyland & Tse’s (2005b) model of evaluative that-clauses. The data are drawn from an online corpus--The Database of English for Academic Purposes (DEAP) corpus. We randomly select 1000 that-clauses from four disciplines: Biology, Information science, Linguistics, and Media and communication. We aim to contribute to our understanding of this line of research by 1) investigating less studied disciplines, and 2) explaining such differences by drawing on theoretical insights from systemic functional linguistics and knowledge-knower structures.

It has been shown that evaluative that-clauses were mainly used to evaluate their current claims and findings from previous studies. That-clause allows writers to make both detailed claims and wide-angled ones, from projecting the specific results and interpreting and explaining the findings, to major conclusions and contributions of their own study. That-clause is also an important device for reviewing in detail the available information on certain research areas, by providing both widely accepted knowledge and the latest trends and findings. Information about the method/theory/model can make the research findings more reliable, participants’ voice is essential in research that has interview materials, and readers’ voice is a useful resource of engagement.

From the interpersonal perspective, the epistemic stance was primarily preferred than attitudinal stance in academic writing. Writers tended to use that-clauses with hedging expressions to soften their tone towards the propositions they have made and to make their claims more dialogically expansive. The attitudinal stance was less common, although it allows writers to highlight the importance of their findings. The source of the evaluation was primarily concealed or attributed to abstract entities. This result might be explained by the fact that impersonal attribution increases the reliability and objectivity of the projected claims.

The evaluative meaning was commonly expressed by that-clauses with verbal predicates, especially relational verbs and mental verbs. Noun-that clauses can help foreground the writer’s evaluation towards the status of the proposition, such as an idea, argument, evidence and possibility. Adjective predicates were primarily connected with it+v-link+ADJ that pattern, which can be used to express the meaning of likelihood and obviousness, importance and necessity, interest and surprise and others.

It is also shown that disciplinary conventions are embedded in the use of evaluative that-clauses. This indicates that these discoursal practices of evaluation and interaction through that-clauses are constructed according to the communicative purposes and the norms and values of disciplinary communities. Drawing on the findings of this research, this thesis concludes by providing some suggestions for future research while offering theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical perspectives on the evaluative and interactional linguistic features of that-clauses.

Their Present Miserable State of Cremation: preparing a volume for the Index of Middle English Prose on the Cotton manuscripts in the British Library

Alpo Honkapohja, Postdoctoral fellow, ILOS

Time and place: Mar. 24, 2022 4:00 PM–5:30 PM, PAM-389

Access to medieval manuscripts, which form a major part of our collective heritage, is dependent on the search tools available to us. The Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP), an expanding catalogue of works and their opening and closing lines, is the most important reference tool for Middle English non-verse texts. Through its printed catalogues it seeks, for the first time, to locate and identify all surviving English prose texts composed between c. 1200 and 1500.

In this talk, I will present my work on cataloguing Middle English prose for IMEP in manuscripts belonging to the Cotton collection now housed in the British Library. This rather famous collection of manuscripts was originally collected by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571-1631) and later damaged in a tragic library fire in 1731.

The talk will consist of three parts. In the first part, I will present my MSCA-IF project, currently hosted by ILOS, and discuss how it complements the ongoing work of making the IMEP available digitally. In the second, I will describe the Cotton collection, giving an overview of the collection, of Middle English prose located in it and my own experiences of working with these manuscripts, some of which have received substantial fire damage. In the third part, I will briefly discuss challenges related to developing a search tool that is able to handle the large amount of variation inherent to a non-standardised vernacular like Middle English.

Impersonal passives in English and Norwegian

Hilde Hasselgård, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2022 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM-389

This study 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. Four patterns containing the dummy subject it/det and a passive verb phrase are identified, as illustrated in examples (1)-(4).

(1) Det ble ledd og konversert. (HW2)
There was laughter and conversation. (HW2T)

(2) Det ble tent en lykt. (KAL1)
A lantern was lit. (KAL1T)

(3) It was acknowledged that Harriet and David had a gift for this kind of thing. (DL1)
Det var vedtatt at Harriet og David hadde en egen evne til dette. (DL1T)

(4) …he was broad of brow and chest, it is said, and when young excelled in wrestling. (JH1)
Han var bred over brystet og pannen, sies det, og i sin ungdom utmerket han seg som bryter. (JH1T)

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 (1) and transitive verbs which retain their object in the passive (2). These two are most uncontroversially termed "impersonal passives", while the construction in (3) is typically discussed as a case of extraposition in English grammars, while the parenthetical construction in (4) may be seen as a variant of this.

Regardless of the terminology used to describe them, 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.

2021

Longitudinal variation in verb inflection in the writings of the Scottish migrant Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1762-1841)

Nora Dörnbrack, PhD candidate, ILOS

Time: Mar. 11, 2021 4:15 PM–5:00 PM

In this presentation, I will explore historical intra-writer variation in the ego-documents of the Scottish migrant Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald (1762–1841). Her writings span over 50 years and are thus suitable to discuss longitudinal variation in verb inflection over the course of her life.

The data for this study comes from the Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald papers. This collection comprises among others diaries, letter books, commonplace books and watercolour drawings. Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald spent most of her life on Little Cumbrae, an isle in the Firth of Clyde, before she decided to emigrate together with her husband and four young children to America in 1807, where they settled on a farm in rural New York State. Mary Ann was an ardent writer, and kept diaries and letter books both prior to and after her emigration, chronicling life on a farm first in Scotland and then in rural America. Taken together, her eight diaries and two letter books comprise roughly 440,000 words, making it an unusually comprehensive source for linguistic investigation into intra-writer variation.

In this presentation, I will give a brief overview of the material, before discussing four
features of Modern Scots verb inflection in Archbald’s writings in greater detail. More specifically, I will explore how the use of the syncretism of past tense and past participle in for example wrote/written, present tense -s for all persons, preterites like catched, eat, keept and the past tense marker ’d in verbs like employ’d, awaken’d, varies over the course of Mary Ann’s lifetime. Lastly, I will explore which factors might explain the decrease of the four abovementioned features, such as the sudden change of her surrounding speech community.

A mixed-methods and mixed-models approach to spoken English

Nele Põldvere, postdoctoral fellow, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 22, 2021 4:15 PM–5:15 PM, Zoom

In this talk, I will mainly present work related to my PhD thesis, which I defended at Lund University in September 2019. The thesis was concerned with developing a mixed-methods and mixed-models approach to spoken English. More precisely, it aimed to further our understanding of the use and development of constructions in spoken dialogue, and to propose a dynamic and socio-cognitive description and explanation of dialogic meaning-making. The work fell within the broad framework of usage-based Cognitive–Functional Linguistics, which adopts a contextualised conception of meaning in language. However, not even cognitive and functional linguistic approaches to language have been immune to the written language bias evident in the language sciences more generally, and even if they have generated investigations that embrace the idiosyncrasies of spoken dialogue, these investigations have emphasised either the cognitive or interactive dimensions of speech, largely ignoring the interaction between them. Also, we have limited knowledge of the kinds of properties that influence constructional meaning and the underlying processes that govern the emergence, interpretation and development of constructions in spoken dialogue. These are exactly the kinds of issues that I investigated in my thesis, by drawing on a range of constructions, cognitive–functional approaches and methodological techniques. One of the methodological innovations of the thesis was the compilation and use of the London–Lund Corpus 2, a new half-a-million-word corpus of spoken British English. In the talk, I will explain how and why the corpus was compiled as well as how one can gain access to it.

I will end the talk by giving a brief overview of my current work on the language of fake news within the Fakespeak project in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages.

Preposition drop in English and Danish fragments

Joanna Nykiel and Jacob Thaisen

Time: May 19, 2021 4:15 PM–5:30 PM

In this presentation we are the first to explore how the probability of preposition drop differs among languages. Preposition drop refers to the choice to omit prepositions from fragments that could otherwise host them (e.g. A: Guess who I’m about to meet with. B: (With) who?). There is evidence that preposition drop is cross-linguistically common. However, its availability or frequency cannot be predicted from the syntax of individual languages, raising the question of how it can be predicted. We begin by reviewing a recent proposal that the rate of preposition drop can be predicted from the proportion of semantically dependent combinations of prepositions with other lexical categories in a language, being high in languages that have numerous such combinations (Nykiel & Hawkins 2020). This proposal is based on U.S. English corpus data and our purpose here is to test it on Danish corpus data. We show that Danish has high frequencies of semantically dependent combinations and its probability of P-drop is high at .68. These results align Danish with English to a large extent.

Legal Interpretation and the Forms of Law

Nicholas Allott (joint work with Benjamin Shaer, Carleton University)

Time and place: Oct. 28, 2021 3:15 PM, PAM 389

This talk is about the linguistic form of provisions in statutes and what can be called the ’structure’ of the legal rules that their promulgation brings into being. There are two apparent mismatches between the linguistic form of a typical provision and the legal rule that is enacted by its promulgation. Legal rules not only have prescriptive content (i.e. what they prohibit, or in some cases what they mandate) but also geographical extent and, arguably, also conditions of application, where these both limit to whom a law applies. For example, the geographical extent of Section 78 of the Highway Act 1835 is the UK; it applies to drivers; and it prohibits driving on the right.

At first sight, the linguistic form of provisions is simpler, distinguishing only between what it takes to break a law (e.g. driving on the right) and the consequences of doing so (i.e. that an offence has been committed, and that a certain punishment applies). We show: 1) geographical extent is usually not mentioned; 2) where there are conditions of application they are explicitly set out; and 3) various linguistic constructions are used which clearly distinguish conditions of application from what is prohibited. Our findings lend support to the claim that conditions of application are distinct from geographical extent on the one hand and what is prohibited on the other.

The MULTIWRITE project

Hildegunn Dirdal, Eva Thue Vold, Åsta Haukås & Kaja Evang

Time and place: Nov. 17, 2021 3:15 PM–4:30 PM, PAM-389

In this talk, we will present the background for and the aims of the MULTIWRITE project, which officially starts on 1 December.

Studies on cross-linguistic influence usually investigate only one language at a time to find out how the development is influenced by another language, often the first language. However, people often learn and develop in several languages simultaneously. There is a need for studies that investigate how these languages interact and that follow the process over time.

In Norway, a majority of students learn three languages in school – Norwegian, English and a language of choice, usually French, German or Spanish. MULTIWRITE will investigate the way in which these languages interact through analysis of the texts that students write over the first year of upper secondary school. We will also investigate the feedback given by the language teachers to find out how it influences the development and whether feedback practices differ between language subjects. In a final stage, we will present our results to language teachers and, together with them, develop and test a model for collaboration across language subjects.

Intra-writer variation in use of written Scots during the Union debates of 1707

Sarah van Eyndhoven, University of Edinburgh

Time and place: Dec. 9, 2021 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, Zoom (link below)

The beginning of the 18th century saw the lead-up to a new turning point in Scottish political history, but also, seemingly, the final chapter of written Scots, cementing an ongoing anglicisation process that stretched back 150 years. English became the medium of choice for most forms of serious prose, while written Scots became largely relegated to `the domestic, the familiar, the sentimental, [and] the comic.' (Murison, 1979, p. 37). Yet linguistic awareness of Scots was increasing at this time (Jones, 1995) and political and religious tension intensified in the years leading up to the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 (Jackson, 2008). In the face of such a linguistic and
political awakening, this particular moment of Scots history is a unique period of time to examine.

However, Early Modern Scots is comparatively under-researched, and it is not entirely clear what the written language looked like at this moment in time. We know that printed works in Scotland were frequently intended for the larger, English speaking audience and thus subject to anglicisation during the publication process (Meurman-Solin, 1993, pp. 141{142). However self-monitoring tends to be less strict in personal writings than in official public documents (Dossena, 2009, p. 61), thus it seems plausible that correspondence might re ect more 'non-standard' features and use of Scots. To answer this possibility, more analysis is needed. In particular, the use of Scots in correspondence remains to be explored. I start by exploring the writings of the Presbyterian minister Robert Wodrow, who wrote prolifically in early 18th century beyond, and compare these to the letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath, and John Hay, the Marquess of Tweeddale. While these are just the writings of three figures, all three were heavily involved in the Union debates, demonstrate antithetical political viewpoints, and were well-connected. Examining a few letters in particular, I explore the extent and form of Scots in their writings, which linguistic levels show a continuation of Scots (orthographic, phonological, lexical), and possible motivations there for. This in turn allows us to examine how Scots was constructed within the formulaic but personal nature of correspondence, to recipients both local and supra-regional.

References

Dossena, M. (2009). Language Attitudes and Choice in the Scottish Reformation. In D. G. Mullan & C. Gribben (Eds.), Literature and the Scottish Reformation (pp. 45–62). Routledge. Retrieved August 17, 2020, from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action? docID=438450
Jackson, C. (2008). Conceptions of Nationhood in the Anglo-Scottish Union Debates of 1707. In S. J. Brown & C. A. Whatley (Eds.), The Union of 1707 (pp. 61–77). Edinburgh University Press. Retrieved April 27, 2020, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1r261m.8
Jones, C. (1995). A language suppressed: The pronunciation of the Scots language in the 18th century. John Donald.
Meurman-Solin, A. (1993). Variation and change in early Scottish prose : Studies based on the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.
Murison, D. (1979). The Historical Background. In A. Aitken & T. McArthur (Eds.), Languages of Scotland (pp. 1–13). W&R Chambers.

Sarah Van Eyndhoven is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, working on Ideology and Identity in the use of written Scots during the Union of 1707.

2020

Patternization! -- How to measure syntactic diversity

Alexander Pfaff

Time and place: Feb. 5, 2020 4:15 PM, PAM 389

In this presentation, I will summarize aspects of an ongoing research project intended to account for “Constraints on Syntactic Variation” in Old Germanic noun phrases. One component of the project is the development of an annotated database specifically dedicated to noun phrases.

More specifically, I will develop the (theory-neutral) notion of a pattern as a linear string of formal features, and patternization as a method to systematically and exhaustively describe, classify and quantify word order variation in the noun phrase – and beyond. At the outset, patternization provides a purely mathematical perspective examining (annotation) categories in terms of numbers, combinatorics, distribution etc., but since it is intended to be a recursive procedure, it will successively produce results that are also syntactically significant. In principle, the method described can be conducted manually, but practically, it requires more computational power; the presentation will alternately describe the idea itself and a Python tool (also currently being developed) used to perform the various tasks.

2019

Language-specific and individual differences in the interviews about language and national identity (Corpus of spoken Italian at the University of Oslo)

Elizaveta Khachaturyan, ILOS

Time and place: Jan. 31, 2019 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I will introduce a corpus of Spoken Italian (SILaNa - Spoken Italian: Interviews about Language and Nation) under construction at the University of Oslo (accessible version will be ready in winter 2019). Secondly, I will discuss how this type of corpus can be used for the analysis of different linguistic domains, in particular I will compare the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the answers of different informants and the DMs’ role in structuring the conversation.

The corpus of Spoken Italian at the University of Oslo (UiO) contains the interviews collected with two groups of informants: 1) 20 Italian native speakers (L1) living in Norway (ca. 124.000 words); 2) ten informants (ca. 45.000 words) having lived in Italy for more than ten years and considered “almost native speakers” (L2) of Italian (cfr. F.Pauletto & C.Bardel 2015 about the term quasi nativo “almost native”). Among these ten informants: seven are native speakers of another Romance language, two speak Slavic languages and one – Chinese.

The starting point for the construction of the corpus was the idea that, on the one hand, each language gives us different possibilities to speak about the world (in particular, as it is shown by various tests, cfr. contrastive studies on the event conceptualization in present, i.e. Bylund 2011), but on the other hand, there are also individual differences between the native-speakers of the same language. Within the construction of the corpus we tried to take into account both types of differences and for this reason we created a very similar situation of communication for our informants: the corpus contains not only the same type of communication (semi-conducted interviews), but also the discussion of the same topic (all the interviews are dedicated to the problems of integration in a new society and to the role of language in this process (for more details about the interviews, see Khachaturyan & Camilotti 2017)). To make the conditions of the communication even more comparable the interviewer (as far as the role of the interlocutor is important, i.e., Katriel 1985) and the questions asked to the informants were always the same. As we will see in the second part of the presentation, these common features allow us to compare differences between native and non-native speakers in the way they organize their discourse, as well as individual differences between L1 speakers when talking about the same topic.

To illustrate this, in the second part, I will discuss the use of some DMs when answering questions and structuring the conversation. It is interesting to observe that in the discourse of native speakers, different DMs can be more or less frequent depending on the whole communicative strategy used by the speaker, while in the L2 discourse they are often considered as a sign of learner’s proficiency (Hasselgren 2002). I will analyze in more details the use of the DMs diciamo and insomma. Diciamo is one of the most frequent DMs for L1 and L2, insomma is rarer and its use is often based on individual preferences.

References

Bylund, E. 2011, Language-specific Patterns in Event Conceptualization: Insights from Bilingualism. In Pavlenko, A. (ed.) Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp.108-142.
Hasselgren A., 2002. Learner corpora and language testing: smallwords as markers of learner frequency. In Pons Bordería, S. (ed.): Models of Discourse Segmentation. Explorations across Romance Languages. Amsterdam : John Benjamins. Pragmatics and Beyond New Series, pp.185-218
Katriel T. 1985. Speech in context: Moving towards an integrative perspective. In Informatologia Yugoslavica 17, pp.171-176.
Khachaturyan E. & Camilotti S. 2017. The Place of Language in (Re)constructing Identity: The Case of “Fortunate Immigrants” to/from Italy. In Khachaturyan E. & Grassi S. (eds.) Romance studies (special issue), 35(1), pp.31- 47.
Pauletto F. & Bardel C. 2015 Direi che: strategie di mitigazione nell’interazione di un’apprendente «quasi nativa». In Borreguero Zuloaga M. & Gómez-Jordana Ferary S. (eds.), Marqueurs du discours dans les langues romanes: une approche contrastive. Limoges: Lambert Lucas, pp.425-437.

Changed perspectives

On modernised punctuation in Middle English texts

Time and place: Feb. 21, 2019 4:15 PM, PAM 489

In Present-Day English (PDE), punctuation is considered to be primarily grammatical, meaning that it helps the reader to “resolve structural uncertainties in a text, and to signal nuances of semantic significance” (Parkes 2016: 1). Studies (e.g. Baldwin & Coady 1978) have shown that adult readers rely on punctuation to generate appropriate syntactic structures and draw meaningful semantic interpretations from the written text. However, this grammatical function of punctuation is commonly thought to have become central as late as during the 17th century (Schou 2007: 213), prior to which punctuation is believed to have been primarily prosodic, i.e. indicating pauses, length of pauses and/or intonation (Levinson 1985: 66–67). As a result, Middle English (ME) punctuation may, to a modern day reader, appear erratic, inconsistent, or just ‘wrong’ (see Levinson 1985: 118) and using modernised punctuation has become a long-standing practice in editions of historical documents.

However, adding PDE punctuation to historical material may lead the reader to generate a syntactic structure and semantic interpretation that is unlikely to be concluded from the historical material. Previous studies (e.g. Brown 1986) have shown that modernised punctuation may alter our understanding of the original text; however, such studies have been primarily concerned with a small number of punctuation marks and/or texts. The general effects, and the extent of those effects, of modernised punctuation on our syntactic and semantic understanding of ME remain, therefore, largely unknown.

In an attempt to shine a light on the extent and effects of modernised punctuation, this study aims to address three research questions: (1) to what extent does modernised punctuation allow for inferring syntactic constructions that are unlikely to be generated from the original material; (2) how has modernised punctuation influenced our (semantic) understanding of medieval works; and (3) does this study reveal whether the practice of modernised punctuation is warranted and useful for our understanding of medieval linguistic structures and literature, or the opposite?

In order to do so, this project will entail a comparative study of ME manuscripts and their later-published editions. In the study’s first stage, several ME manuscripts will be transcribed and tagged, syntactically and semantically. The study will then turn to the corresponding passages of the later-published editions, which will be syntactically and semantically parsed, and the resulting annotated editions will be compared to the annotated versions of the manuscripts, with a view to discerning whether and to what extent the addition of modernized punctuation has affected the syntactic structure and semantic interpretation of the text.

A pilot study I have carried out indicates firstly, that the addition of modernised punctuation may alter both the syntactic structure and semantic understanding of the historical material; similar conclusions have been drawn in previous research (e.g. Mitchell 1980; Brown 1986; Gerritsen 1990). Secondly, the pilot study suggests that the use of punctuation marks may be significantly more common in ME than previously believed. It seems clear that a study into the use of modernised punctuation, its usefulness, and its possible effects on our current understanding of earlier stages of the English language is both warranted and long overdue.

References

Baldwin, Scott R. & James M. Coady. 1978. Pshycholinguistic approaches to a theory of punctuation. Journal of Reading Behavior 10(4). 363–375. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/10862967809547290. (2 January, 2018)
Brown, Emerson Jr. 1986. The Knight’s tale, 2639: Guilt by punctuation. The Chaucer Review 21(2). 133–141. doi: www.jstor.org/stable/25093990. (4 November, 2017)
Gerritsen, Marinel. 1990. The relationship between punctuation and syntax in Middle Dutch. In Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical linguistics and philology (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 46), 187–226. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Levinson, Joan Persily. 1985. Punctuation and the orthographic sentence: A linguistic analysis. New York: City University of New York Doctoral dissertation.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1980. The Dangers of Disguise: Old English texts in Modern punctuation. Review of English studies 31(124). 385–413. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXI.124.385. (10 January, 2019).
Parkes, Malcolm Beckwitt. 2016. Pause and effect. London: Routledge.
Schou, Karsten. 2007. The syntactic status of English punctuation. English Studies 88(2). 195–216. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00138380601042790. (28 December, 2017).

Language variation in late Middle English manuscripts

A case study of Pricke of Conscience. Sara Albán Barcia, University of Vigo.

Time and place: Mar. 21, 2019 4:15 PM, PAM 489

My PhD aims to provide a dialectology and a paleography analysis of the late Middle English work Pricke of Conscience, a religious text written in the 14th C. in the Northumbrian area of medieval England. The study combines three main strands, described below.

(I) Middle English dialectology. Given the (alleged) northern origin of the poem, it will be relevant to study the dialect of the text. To this end, I will draw a comparative analysis of five copies of Pricke of Conscience presumably belonging to different linguistic localizations in medieval England. I will pay special attention to internal variation regarding orthography/phonology, morphology and lexicon.

(II) Medieval paleography. The poem Pricke of Conscience is said to be one of the manuscripts of which more copies were made in late Middle English (C14th-15th). For my analysis of the five regional copies, I will discuss issues related to scribal tradition and scribal schools, together with a detailed physical description of each manuscript.

(III) Digital Humanities. In line with recent trends in library archive studies and historical linguistics, I will make use of digital collections of medieval manuscripts and I will provide a two-fold transliteration in TXT and XML formats, following the encoding practices in TEI (lite) P5, as well as a morpho-lexical glossary.

Coda Approximants in British English: A diachronic and synchronic account

Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2019 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

Present-Day English (PDE) has four approximants, two semi-vowels (/j/ and /w/) and two liquids (/r/ and /l/). Approximants are phonetically vowel-like with little obstruction to the airstream, but phonologically consonant-like, forming syllabic onsets and codas.

Phonotactically, the semi-vowels are restricted to onsets, which restriction goes back to early Middle English. In most varieties of English in England, the /r/ is restricted to onsets too, after the eighteenth-century process called R-Dropping (Wells 1982). The same process is affecting coda /l/ in many varieties of PDE (L-Vocalisation, Wells 1982). Thus, there seems to be a long-term ‘conspiracy’ in British English (BrE) to bar approximants from codas.

The history of the approximants shows other striking similarities, including their tendency to lengthen preceding vowels, and to vocalise and combine with preceding vowels to form diphthongs. Evidence from earlier English suggests that such phonetic processes have affected English approximants since their earliest history (Jones 1989).

This presentation seeks to outline briefly the historical developments of English approximants; to identify common characteristics; to assess articulatory-acoustic findings from modern processes affecting approximants, and evaluate how these may elucidate historical processes; and to determine which model(s) provide(s) the best account of these changes. Historical evidence is culled from LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English)[1] and eLALME (the electronic version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English),[2] as well as from DOEC (The Dictionary of Old English Corpus).[3]

I propose that a model combining both articulatory-gestural and acoustic features is best able to describe what happens to coda approximants (e.g. Ohala and Lorentz 1977; Sproat and Fujimura 1993; Stuart-Smith 2007), and that a model which additionally accommodates syllable structure and re-analysis (e.g. Jones 1989; Borowsky and Horvath 1997) may go a long way towards explaining the peculiar long-term behaviour of BrE approximants.

References

Borowsky, T. and B. Horvath. 1997. “L-vocalization in Australian English”. In Variation, change and phonological theory, edited by F. Hinskens et al., 101-123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jones, C. 1989. A History of English Phonology. London: Longman.
Ohala, J.J. and J. Lorentz. 1977. “The story of [w]: an exercise in the phonetic explanation for sound patterns”. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: 577-599.
Sproat, R. and O. Fujimura. 1993. “Allophonic variation in English /l/ and its implications for pho-netic implementations”. Journal of Phonetics 21: 291-311.
Stuart-Smith, J. 2007. “A sociophonetic investigation of postvocalic /r/ in Glaswegian adolescents”. The Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: 1449-1452.
Wells, J.H. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: CUP.

Minutes of action! The language of football match reports in a contrastive perspective

Signe Oksefjell Ebeling, ILOS

Time and place: Sep. 25, 2019 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM-389

Ferguson knew that sports were of no consequence in the long run, but they lent themselves to the written word more readily than most other subjects because each game had a built-in narrative structure … (Paul Auster)

In this talk I will introduce a new comparable corpus – the English-Norwegian Match Report Corpus (ENMaRC) – containing written football match reports from the English Premier League and the Norwegian “Eliteserie”. The reports are from the 2016-2018 seasons and are taken from the clubs' own web pages, written immediately after the matches are finished. By applying corpus-driven extraction methods – word lists, keyword lists, n-grams – the study offers some first explorations into lexico-grammatical features that characterise this particular text type in the two languages. Notably, the study reveals that match reports in the two languages are similar to other text types in the use of time and space expressions in the two languages, while the keyword analysis uncovers some interesting cross-linguistic differences in the language used to report on victories vs. defeats.

Following these more general observations of the corpus data, I will move on to examine a set of time expressions used in online football match reports in English vs. Norwegian. The starting point of the investigation is the most frequently occurring lexical words referring to time, namely minutes and minutter ‘minutes’. By pinpointing the phraseological characteristics of these items, the study seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how time expressions are used to frame events in football match reports. Drawing on insights from previous contrastive studies of English and Norwegian, which have shown that time adverbials are frequent in several text types in both languages (Ebeling et al. 2013; Hasselgård 2014; Ebeling & Ebeling 2017), this study may contribute to a better cross-linguistic understanding of the use of time expressions in English and Norwegian in general.

Although initial observations of minutes and minutter in the material drawn from the ENMaRC show substantial overlap between the two languages in terms of phraseological patterning, there are also some differences worth noting. English has more different recurrent patterns with minutes, i.e. there is less variation in the Norwegian data, and some patterns seem to be unique to English. To narrow the scope, the current study focuses on the predominant pattern in each language, i.e. the English sequence on # minutes (1), and the Norwegian sequence etter # minutter ‘after # minutes’ (2).

... Alexis smashed home a crucial third goal on 83 minutes. (AFC)
Etter 86 minutter fikk vi likevel en god sjanse ... (AaFK)
‘After 86 minutes got we even so a good chance’

Further observations of a subset of the data suggest that there may be interesting cross-linguistic differences in the way in which events at a specific moment in time are reported, notably:

in the preferred placement of the time expression in the clause;
in the tense used;
with regard to which participant is most prominent;
when, during the 90 minutes of a game, the English/Norwegian pattern is typically used.

In my talk, then, I will offer a contrastive analysis of the two main minute patterns in light of these four points.

References

Auster, Paul. 2017. 4 3 2 1: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt.
Ebeling, Jarle, Signe Oksefjell Ebeling and Hilde Hasselgård. 2013. Using recurrent word-combinations to explore cross-linguistic differences, In Karin Aijmer & Bengt Altenberg (ed.), Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson. Amsterdam: Benjamins.177–199.
Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell & Jarle Ebeling. 2017. A cross-linguistic comparison of recurrent word combinations in a comparable corpus of English and Norwegian fiction. In Markéta Janebová, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski & Michaela Martinková (eds.), Contrasting English and Other Languages through Corpora, 2–31. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Hasselgård, Hilde. 2014. Discourse-structuring functions of initial adverbials in English and Norwegian news and fiction. Languages in Contrast 14(1). 732–3192.

Searching for parallels between child language acquisition and historical change: What corpora can tell us about shared developmental pathways

María José López-Couso, University of Santiago de Compostela

Time and place: Oct. 23, 2019 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM-389

Over the last few decades a number of similarities in developmental patterns between diachronic change and first language acquisition have been identified both for English and for other languages in different grammatical domains. Examples of such comparable developmental patterns can be found in the areas of modality (Stephany 1986 on deontic and epistemic meanings), tense and aspect (Slobin 1994 on the present perfect), and word order (van Kemenade and Westergaard 2012 on the variation between verb-second and non-verb second order in declarative clauses).

This presentation examines some attested cases of sequential isomorphism between historical development and L1 acquisition and explores the potential of corpus data to account for such parallels. In addition to a more theoretically oriented discussion of the controversial role of child language acquisition in diachronic change and of the existence of similar or different principles behind the parallels, the presentation focuses on the analysis of two selected shared developmental pathways: (i) existential there and (ii) the so-called ‘emerging modal’ want to/wanna.

In the first of these case studies, I compare the diachronic grammaticalization of existential there with the developmental relation between deictic and existential there identified by Johnson (2001) for Child English. Drawing on data from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) (MacWhinney 2000), Johnson shows that children use occurrences of the deictic there as a model for the acquisition of the existential pattern, through ‘overlap utterances’ which exemplify both formal and semantic-pragmatic properties of both the source and the target constructions. Taking Johnson’s longitudinal evidence as a point of departure, I examine the prose texts of the Old and Middle English sections of the Helsinki Corpus, and show that, as is the case in ontogenetic development, in diachronic terms existential there also derives from locative there, via overlap (bridging) contexts, where there performs both a deictic and an existence-informing function (López-Couso 2011).

The second case study brings us to the domain of modality, which has been shown to constitute a particularly suitable testing ground for the identification of potential parallels between ontogeny and diachrony. The focus in this part of the presentation is on the ontogenetic and the diachronic development of the ‘emerging modal’ want to/wanna. Along the lines suggested by Schmidtke-Bode (2009) for going to/gonna (see also López-Couso 2017), I compare Krug’s (2000) account of the historical evolution of want to/wanna with the acquisition of this emerging modal by English-speaking children with data from the CHILDES archive. The results show that the overall developmental patterns in Child English seem to be consistent with the diachronic facts, with the full form want to being acquired earlier than the reduced form wanna, via an intermediate stage with the variant wan(t) (ta), which represents the beginnings of the process of erosion of want to.

References

Johnson, Christopher R. 2001. Constructional grounding: On the relation between deictic and existential there-constructions in acquisition. In Alan Cienki, Barbara J. Luka & Michael B. Smith (eds.), Conceptual and discourse factors in linguistic structure, 123-136. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Krug, Manfred. 2000. Emerging English modals: A corpus-based study of grammaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
López-Couso, María José. 2011. Developmental parallels in diachronic and ontogenetic grammaticalization: Existential there as a test case. Folia Linguistica 45 (1): 81-102.
López-Couso, María José. 2017. Transferring insights from child language acquisition to diachronic change (and vice versa). In Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin & Simone E. Pfenninger (eds.), The changing English language: Psycholinguistic perspectives, 332-347. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten. 2009. Going to-V and gonna-V in child language: A quantitative approach to constructional development. Cognitive Linguistics 20 (3): 509-538.
Slobin, Dan I. 1994. Talking perfectly. Discourse origins of the present perfect. In William Pagliuca (ed.), Perspectives on grammaticalization, 119-133. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Stephany, Ursula. 1986. Modality. In Paul Fletcher & Michael Garman (eds.), Language acquisition. Studies in first language development, 375-400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Kemenade, Ans & Marit Westergaard. 2012. Syntax and information structure: V2 variation in Middle English. In Anneli Meurman-Solin, María José López-Couso & Bettelou Los (eds.), Information structure and syntactic change in the history of English, 87-118. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Literal and metaphorical meaning: In search of a lost distinction

Nicholas Allott

Time and place: Nov. 27, 2019 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 389

Intuitively, there is a distinction between (1a–c) and 1d: the former are literal uses; the latter is metaphorical:

(1a) cut bread
(1b) cut hair
(1c) cut the grass
(1d) cut taxes

On one traditional view, metaphorical uses are ones that express a different sense from the literal i.e. linguistic i.e. encoded sense.

But it seems to be false that each word has one sense which is expressed in every literal use: the senses of cut in each of (1a–c) seem to be different. Similarly (2a–b) show two literal senses of book:

(2a) John read the book on his computer [book content]
(2b) John burned the book [book object]

So the traditional criterion won’t distinguish literal and metaphorical uses.

Could book, cut etc. be homonyms? No: there is recent experimental evidence that the distinction between homonyms (e.g. bat [rodent] and bat [sports]) and polysemes (e.g. different senses of the noun book) is cognitively real: they are processed differently. In particular, in processing polysemes, there’s no bias towards the most frequent or otherwise dominant sense (Frisson, 2015), while it has long been known that there is such a bias for homonyms.

It seems, therefore, that the linguistic meaning of a polysemous word is something that is neutral between its senses and not equal to any of them. So the criterion above for figurative meaning is a non-starter.

Another possible criterion is that metaphorical uses are those which drop a central feature of the literal sense (Allott & Textor, 2017). E.g. <affects material object> in (1d) and <fish> in (3):

(3) My lawyer is a shark.

But cross-linguistic work (Glanzberg, 2008; Spalek, 2015) shows that at least some syntacto-semantic features of words persist in metaphorical uses. Compare English cut with Spanish cortar. cortar has some kind of aspectual feature (rather like English destroy), which makes it inapplicable to cases where merely some part is removed (as in English cut away). Crucially this bars both literal uses which are not cases of (roughly) irreversible and total severance and metaphorical extensions like (the Spanish version of) cut taxes by 20%. (Cf. English *destroy taxes by 20% vs. diminish taxes by 20%.)

Where does this leave the search for a criterion for metaphorical uses? I propose that i) we should distinguish between linguistic features and conceptual features, ii) in metaphorical use at least one conceptual feature is dropped; iii) linguistic features are never dropped.

I attempt to support (or refute) these claims by a preliminary survey of relavant examples (e.g. of uses of cut) that can be found in corpora.

References

Allott, N. & Textor, M. (2017). Lexical modulation without concepts: Introducing the derivation proposal. Dialectica, 71(3), 399–424.
Frisson, S. (2015). About bound and scary books: The processing of book polysemies. Lingua, 157, 17–35.
Glanzberg, M. (2008). Metaphor and lexical semantics. The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, 3, 1–47.
Spalek, A. A. (2015). Spanish change of state verbs in composition with atypical theme arguments: Clarifying the meaning shifts. Lingua, 157, 36–53.

2018

From data collection to analysis: towards a Slavic corpus-based dialectogist's virtual work bench

Ruprecht von Waldenfels

Time: Feb. 8

Lexico-grammatical stance markers across registers: Nuancing the (in)formal dichotomy

Tove Larsson, Université Catholique de Louvain

Time and place: Mar. 15, 2018 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

Stance markers (i.e. self-positioning devices) help us position ourselves in relation to our claims, and as such are of central importance in both speech and writing (e.g. Biber et al., 1999). In this talk, I will focus in particular on how stance can be studied in relation to register to nuance the common view of (in)formality as a dichotomy. The study compares the distribution of frequent morphologically related stance markers (e.g. important, importantly, importance) in learner writing from one register (academic writing) to expert writing from several different registers (academic writing, popular science, news, novels and conversation). In doing so, it investigates (i) which of the experts’ registers the learners’ use is closest to and, thus, (ii) whether describing learner use as simply “informal” might be simplifying matters. As student writers have been found to exhibit somewhat insufficient register awareness (Larsson & Kaatari, accepted), such an investigation sheds further light on the often-cited claim that students, in particular non-native-speaker students, are overly informal in their writing (e.g. Altenberg & Tapper, 1998). The study uses subsets from one expert corpus, BNC-15, two learner corpora, ALEC and VESPA, and two NS student corpora, BAWE and MICUSP. Biber et al.’s (1999:969–970) framework of grammatical stance marking is used, along with inferential and explorative statistics, such as Multiple Correspondence Analysis.

References

ALEC (the Advanced Learner English Corpus). Corpus compiled at Uppsala University in 2013.
Altenberg, B., & Tapper, M. (1998). The use of adverbial connectors in advanced Swedish learners’ written English. In S. Granger (Ed.), Learner English on computer (pp. 80–93). London: Longman.
BAWE (British Academic Written English). Corpus compiled at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes in 2004–2007.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow: Longman.
BNC-15. Subset of the British National Corpus (BNC) sampled in 2012.
Larsson, T. & Kaatari, H. (accepted). Extraposition in learner and expert writing: Exploring (in)formality and the impact of register. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research.
MICUSP (Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers). (2009). Ann Arbor, MI: The Regents of the University of Michigan. Available online from http://micusp.elicorpora.info.
VESPA (Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase). Corpus administered at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain.

Ongoing work in the noun phrase project

Kristin Bech, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 12, 2018 4:15 PM–5:15 PM, PAM 489

This presentation reports on some of the things we are working on in the noun phrase project right now, and it comes in two parts. First I present the recently completed annotation scheme for the noun phrase database that the project will establish, with some annotation examples. In the second part of the presentation, I discuss two models that have been proposed for adjective position in Old English, and I show that neither of them works.

Verbs in American Norwegian: Tense/Finiteness morphology and V2-syntax

Alexander Lykke, ILN

Time and place: May 3, 2018 4:15 PM, PAM489

Introduction

This abstract and talk departs slightly from the conference talk genre. I will start out with discussing a concluded study on the possible interplay between Finiteness Morphology and V2-syntax, which answers most of the questions in the project proposal for my PhD-project. For the last third of the talk, I will turn to work in progress research on Heritage Norwegian tense morphology. The overarching theme is linguistic variation and change.

The first study explores morphologically marked finiteness (FIN) and verb-second word order (V2), in North American Heritage Norwegian (HN), and a possible link between them. A theory put forth by Eide (2009), claims that in English the loss of the productive FIN-marking on main verbs of the weak inflection, has led to a categorical loss of morphological FIN, causing a subsequent loss of V2 in main clause declaratives. These changes separate English from other Germanic languages, e.g. Norwegian. The present study investigates morphological finiteness marking on verbs, and verb placement in main clause declaratives in the Norwegian speech of speakers of HN, whose dominant language is English. In the present material, the link between FIN-morphology and V2 is not apparent, and both categories seem close to the relevant baselines. In a broader perspective, these findings bear on the questions on what causes syntactic change: Is syntactic change caused by preceding morphological change or is it rather driven by other factors like pragmatics and/or semantics? In this case, morphology appears to play no role.

Data

The survey is based on experimental data from nine participants, who each produce approx. 15 main clause declaratives with topicalization. The participants show some variability with regards to production of V2. Three participants produce no non-baseline word order. A second more tenuous grouping of five participants, produce a majority of target-like syntax, but have non-V2 in 7%–33% of their sentences. The last participant, Fargo_ND_01gm produces non-target word order in 10 out of 15 instances (67%). With regards to FIN-morphology, no participant shows a system clearly different from Homeland Norwegian. Firstly, there are no instances of unambiguously inconsistent or non-target-like use of the morphological forms, i.e. there is no use of an unambiguous infinitive for the present, perfect participle for the preterite or vice versa. Secondly, the observed verbal paradigms are almost formally identical to what is found in the baseline Norwegian dialects.

Discussion

The results do not show a clear correlation between (absence of) FIN-morphology and (absence of) V2 in these experimental data. E.g., two speakers with no V2 violations, Sunburg_MN_03gm and Sunburg_MN_12gk, display different morphological FIN-systems: Sunburg_MN_03gm has a system with the FIN-distinction even in the least formally differentiated class (the a-class), whereas sunburg_MN_12gk has a system without the finiteness distinction in this same class. Indeed, there are Norwegian baseline dialects, notably from the Southern Gudbrandsdal area, which lack the morphological FIN-distinction in the a-class (Eide & Hjelde 2015: 78–79), where the status of V2 has never come into question. Sunburg_MN_12gk has ancestral ties to the Gudbrandsdal area. Fargo_ND_01gm (with 67% non-V2) has the same morphological system as sunburg_MN_03gm, who has 100% target-like V2.

I have not found other linguistic factors correlating with non-V2. Eide & Hjelde (2015), studying V2 in HN, report a higher degree of V2 violations when the topic is more syntactically complex. Fargo_ND_01gm, the only participant with a majority of non-V2 clauses, does not show any such tendency. Furthermore, there is no apparent correlation between the type of topic (e.g. adverbial/object etc.) or the type of subject (e.g. pronominal/nominal) and the non-V2 syntax.

Conclusion to the FIN–V2-story: The finiteness and/or tense morphology appears to follow the homeland dialects for most of the participants. This is in keeping with a reported tendency for tense morphology to be stable in heritage grammars, even though morphology is vulnerable to change (Benmamoun et al. 2013: 141–144). Furthermore, my study shows that V2 (i.e. V-to-C movement) in main clause declaratives is relatively stable despite the fact that syntax pertaining to the CP layer is reportedly susceptible to change in heritage grammars (see e.g. Benmamoun et al. 2013: 148–149). My results are in line with Håkansson (1995), who shows that V2 is at baseline level in data from five heritage speakers of Swedish.

The way onwards: Change and stability in tense morphology
Regular weak verbs in nynorsk	Larger weak class (a-class)	Smaller weak class (te-type)	Smaller weak class (de-type)	Smaller weak class (dde-type)
Infinitive	hopp-e ‘jump’ /hope/	kjøp-e ‘buy’ /çø:pe/	prøv-e ‘try’ /prø:ve/	nå-Ø ‘reach’ /no:/
Present	hopp-ar /hopar/	kjøp-er /çø:per/	prøv-er /prø:ver/	nå-r /no:r/
Preterite	hopp-a /hopa/	kjøp-te /çøpte/	prøv-de /prøvde/	nå-dde /node/
Participle	hopp-a /hopa/	kjøp-t /çøpt/	prøv-d /prøvd/	nå-dd /nod/

In my ongoing research, my data are retrieved from the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS, Johannessen 2015). The CANS consists of the recorded speech of American Norwegian speakers, which is transcribed orthophonically, transliterated orthographically. The corpus is also tagged for several grammatical categories, e.g. part of speech, by an automatic tagger. At the present the corpus contains 251315 tokens/words, distributed across 69 speakers.

Given the reported tendency for tense morphology to be a stable category in an unstable domain (morphology), I ask: What changes, if any, occur in American Heritage Norwegian, and how can we explain them? Additionally, how can this cross-linguistic stability of tense morphology in heritage varieties be explained?

For the present, I will report some tendencies in the data from the CANS. The main tendency is indeed that tense morphology is stable, but we do see some variation and change in use of inflectional affixes. One tendency is overregularization, e.g. the irregular verb gå ‘walk’ – gikk (pret.) getting a regular preterite gådde. An explanation for such a levelling is probably found in decreased exposure to Norwegian language.

Another tendency is variable use of inflectional affixes with one root, e.g. plukke ‘pick’ being inflected as both plukte and plukka in the preterite by the same informant. I have found two speakers, Chicago_IL_01gk and Coon_Valley_WI_12gm, who produce tense morphology which at the very least shows that they have uncertain knowledge of the inflectional endings.

References

Benmamoun, E., S. Montrul & M. Polinsky (2013): «Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics.», In: Theoretical Linguistics 39 (3–4), DOI: 10.1515/tl-2013-0009, pp. 129–181
Eide, K. M. (2009): «Finiteness: The haves and the have-nots.», In: A. Alexiadou, J. Hankamer, T. McFadden, J. Nuger, F. Schäfer (red.): Advances in Comparative Germanic Syntax, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam / Philadelphia, pp. 357–389
Eide, K. M. & A. Hjelde (2015): «Verb Second and Finiteness Morphology in Norwegian Heritage Language of the American Midwest.», In: R. B. Page & M. Putnam (red.): Moribund Germanic Heritage Languages in North America, Brill, Leiden / Boston, pp. 64–101
Håkansson, G. (1995): «Syntax and morphology in language attrition: A study of five bilingual expatriate Swedes.», In: International Journal of Applied Linguistics 5, pp. 153–171
Johannessen, J. B. (2015): «The Corpus of American Norwegian Speech (CANS).», In: B. Megyesi (red.): Proceedings of the 20th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2015, Linköping University Electronic Press, pp. 297–300 http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/109/040/ecp15109040.pdf, 23. sept. 2015

Exploring new approaches to the corpus-based contrastive study of hedging strategies in spoken language

Stine Hulleberg Johansen

Time and place: Sep. 6, 2018 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

In recent years corpus linguistics and pragmatics have begun exploring their common ground. However, this has not been altogether straightforward, mainly because “core features of pragmatics studies [...] are harder to catch with corpus methodology than lexical or morpho-syntactic features” (Taavitsainen & Jucker, 2015: 12). One such core feature is that of hedging. Hedging strategies can take almost any linguistic (or paralinguistic) form and is not an inherent property of words or phrases (Stenström, 1994). Thus identifying hedging strategies is challenging without a pragmatically annotated corpus.

Consequently, in the absence of pragmatically annotated corpora, two main ways of studying pragmatic phenomena through corpus linguistic methodologies have emerged. One is the form-to-function approach that starts from pre-defined lexical words or constructions whose potential pragmatic uses are examined (Aijmer & Rühlemann, 2015). The second is the function-to-form approach, which starts from a language function and investigates the forms used to perform that function.

Although these approaches are presented as equally relevant in the literature, researchers show a clear preference for the former. This is not surprising as a major challenge with the latter approach is that the function cannot be retrieved, only surface forms orbiting it can be used to identify the function in the corpus. This raises the question of whether the function-to-form approach is a realistic methodological alternative. Moreover, there is a need to understand how this approach actually manifests itself and how it can be applied in corpus-based contrastive studies of pragmatic phenomena to capture cross-linguistic variation.

The present study explores one potential application of the function-to-form approach. By searching for certain characteristics of situations where hedging strategies tend to occur, the study aims to retrieve various realisations of hedging strategies. More specifically, by using the conventionalised direct non-performative refusal strategy no (English) and the corresponding nei (Norwegian) (Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990) as well as the conjunction but (English) and men (Norwegian) signalling contrast or denial of expectation (Blakemore, 1989) as framing devices, the aim is to identify co-occurring hedging strategies in these face-threatening situations. This leads to the following research questions:

RQ1: How can we identify framing devices for extracting pragmatic functions from corpora?
A, conventionalised realisations of speech acts
B, explicit signals of contradiction/contrast
RQ2: Will this application of the function-to-form approach work across languages (Norwegian and English) allowing for a comparison of two or more languages?

The choice of no/nei and but/men as tools in retrieving hedging strategies is rooted in pragmatic research on speech acts and politeness. Politeness is considered a primary motivation for using hedging strategies in conversations (Markkanen & Schröder, 1997). Moreover, refusals have proven to be intrinsically face-threatening across various cultures (Demirkol, 2016). Thus, it is likely that heding strategies will co-occur with refusals as a way of softening the blow. Similarly, saying something that contradicts or is in contrast to what has previously been said can also threaten the hearer’s positive face (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Even contradicting oneself is considered threatening to the speaker’s positive face. Thus identifying conventionalised realisations of refusals or contradictions can be instrumental in locating hedging strategies within a corpus.

In this study, direct refusals will be retrieved from four spoken corpora: BNC2014, Nordic Dialect Corpus (NDC), Norwegian Speech Corpus (NoTa) and the BigBrother corpus (BB). Only the conversational part of the NDC and NoTa will be used to make the data more comparable. There are no bidirectional or directly comparable corpora of spoken Norwegian and English, thus the corpora in this study are chosen based on their degree of comparability and their availability. This allows for a comparison of the results between the two languages.

In the study, 150 random instances of nei and no and 150 random instances of men and but in the respective languages were chosen from the corpora. Table 1 shows the number of nei/no used as refusals and the number of contrastive uses of men/but among the 150 instances in each language.

Although 38.7 % and 32.9 % of the occurrences of nei and no were hedged, there were only 116 instances of the total of 300 nei and no being used as refusals in the data. This indicates that in order to use nei and no as framing devices, one would have to manually process a great deal of data to retrieve a sensible amount and variety of hedging strategies. In contrast, men and but showed more promising numbers with 284 relevant instances and 68.9 % and 56.4 % co-occurring with hedging strategies respectively. Example 1 below illustrates a typical example of hedging strategies (italicised) co-occurring with but in the English dataset.

Example 1 from BNC2014

S0598: you 're nearly an adult --ANONnameF
S0596: I am an adult […]
S0596: I am an adult I can vote
S0598: yeah but what I mean is like you can still say that you 're a teenager though cos eighteen

Preliminary results suggest that conventionalised realisations of face-threatening speech acts and the like can be used to identify other language functions in a corpus. However, the choice of framing device must be carefully selected and tested. In this study, both no and nei and but and men co-occurred with hedging strategies, but but and men returned the highest number of hedging strategies and the greatest variation between realisations. However, more data need to be analysed to confirm this. Furthermore,
using this approach to study how a particular function, with potentially indefinite realisations, is realised can be fruitful in the absence of pragmatically annotated corpora, particularly to capture linguistic variation across languages.

References

Aijmer, K., & Rühlemann, C. (2015). Corpus pragmatics : a handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beebe, L. M., Takahashi, T., & Uliss-Weltz, R. (1990). Pragmatic Transfer in ESL Refusals. In R. Scarcella, C. , E. S. Andersen, & S. D. Krashen (Eds.), Developing communicative competence in a second language (pp. 55-73). New York: Newbury House Publishers.
BigBrother-korpuset, Tekstlaboratoriet, ILN, Universitetet i Oslo. http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/bigbrother/
Blakemore, D. (1989). Denial and contrast: a relevance theoretic analysis of but. Linguistics and Philosophy, 12, 15-37.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness : some universals in language usage (Reissued, with corrections, new introd. and new bibliography. ed. Vol. 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Demirkol, T. (2016). How Do We Say No in English? Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 232, 792-799. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.10.107
Johannessen, Janne Bondi, Joel Priestley, Kristin Hagen, Tor Anders Åfarli, and Øystein Alexander Vangsnes. 2009. The Nordic Dialect Corpus - an Advanced Research Tool. In Jokinen, Kristiina and Eckhard Bick (eds.): Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. NEALT Proceedings Series Volume 4.
Love, R., Dembry, C., Hardie, A., Brezina, V. and McEnery, T. (2017). The Spoken BNC2014: designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. In International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(3), pp. 319-344.
Markkanen, R., & Schröder, H. (1997). Hedging and discourse : approaches to the analysis of a pragmatic phenomenon in academic texts (Vol. vol. 24). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Norsk talespråkskorpus - Oslodelen, Tekstlaboratoriet, ILN, Universitetet i Oslo.
Stenström, A.-B. (1994). An introduction to spoken interaction. London: Longman.
Taavitsainen, I., & Jucker, A. H. (2015). Twenty years of historical pragmatics: Origins, developments and changing thought styles. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 16(1), 1-24.

Not everyone enjoys being loved, but I like it: A contrastive study of three feeling-denoting verbs in English and Norwegian

Øyvind Thormodsæter

Time and place: Sep. 6, 2018 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

Idiomatic use of verbs denoting feelings requires a high command of a language, since such verbs are liable to subjective interpretation both in terms of their inherent intensity and their acceptability in context, and also because their usage to a large extent will be governed by cultural conventions. As such, verbs denoting feelings are interesting from a phraseological point of view, in which context-appropriate multi-word units are thought to be at the core of language production.

This presentation reports on a segment of a larger study of the phraseology of the three English-Norwegian verb pairs ENJOY-NYTE, LOVE-ELSKE and LIKE-LIKE. The study seeks to find out what correspondence patterns and translation paradigms may reveal about similarities and differences between the lexemes in the two languages, how similar meaning is conveyed in the two languages, and how English native speakers and Norwegian learners of English use and understand the English lexemes similarly and differently in context. LOVE, LIKE and ENJOY fit the criteria mentioned: they have overlapping meanings and connotations, their usage will be governed partly by cultural conventions, and they intuitively belong to different parts of the emotional “intensity scale”, which makes them eligible for analysis both from an L1 and an L1-L2 perspective. The Norwegian verbs ELSKE, NYTE and LIKE were chosen for comparison because they are considered the closest equivalents of the respective English verbs based on listings in a number of authoritative bilingual dictionaries.

In this investigation, recurrent sequences including the lexemes will be investigated to determine their selectional preferences in original and translated texts in both languages with the intention of mapping cross-linguistic similarities and differences in use and lexicogrammatical features. The investigation will primarily be corpus-based, and the methodology used is largely based on Gilquin’s (2000/2001: 98-101) modified version of Granger’s (1994) Integrated Contrastive Model, in which Contrastive Analysis (CA) between languages is combined with Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA). In addition to a qualitative analysis of a selection of examples and a lexicogrammatical categorisation of the material inspired by Hunston and Francis’ (2000) pattern grammar, Altenberg’s (1999: 254) formula for calculating mutual correspondence (MC) will be used to indicate the level of correspondence between the lexemes in the bidirectional CA part of the study. Data will be extracted from various corpora for the different parts of the investigation, including the ENPC and the written part of the BNC and LBK for the Contrastive Analysis and BAWE, MICUSP, ICLE and a self-compiled corpus of Norwegian upper-secondary student texts in English and Norwegian for the CIA analysis. This data will finally be compared to data from an elicitation test in order to address the following research questions:

What can an analysis of the lexicogrammatical features and translation paradigms of three English-Norwegian verb pairs denoting feeling tell us about:
a. The level of correspondence between the English and the Norwegian verbs in terms of meaning, usage and selectional preferences/collocations?
b. The level of consistency in meaning in the individual lexicogrammatical pattern for each verb?

a. Is there a systematic difference in how English native speakers and Norwegian learners use and understand these and semantically related verbs?
b. To what extent can the differences in usage be seen as a result of lexicogrammatical differences between the two languages?

The segment presented here will draw on data from the ENPC, and will address questions 1a and 1b. Preliminary searches indicate some clear differences between e.g. ENJOY and NYTE, both in terms of semantic preferences, semantic scope and structural features. In brief, ENJOY is more versatile than NYTE both semantically and syntactically, and NYTE more consistently expresses a strong emotion or intensity. Several patterns have a relatively consistent meaning in the examples found, particularly verb + pronouns and verb + non-finite clauses. Examples of ENJOY being translated into ELSKE [LOVE] and LIKE [LIKE] and of NYTE being translated into LOVE and LIKE indicate an overlap in meaning between the lexemes across languages, as exemplified in (1)-(3) below:

[…] it occurred to him that she was just the sort of woman who would enjoy ten minutes' sex while changing for dinner, […]. (FW1)
[…] det slo ham at hun var akkurat den type kvinne som ville nyte [enjoy] ti minutters sex mens hun skiftet til middag, […]. (FW1T)

She did, however, enjoy the people sitting around and talking, the sociable atmosphere, […]. (DL1)
Men hun likte [liked] at folk satt rundt og pratet, den selskapelige atmosfæren, […]. (DL1T)

[…] he enjoyed watching the way his canvases drank up black […]. (JH1)
[…] han elsket [loved] å se hvordan lerretene suget til seg sort […]. (JH1T)

The preliminary analysis of ENJOY also lends support to Sinclair’s (1999: 158) claim that words often do not express what is considered their “core meaning”, and that “few [words] have a clear meaning independent of the cotext” (ibid). Also, the initial analysis shows a relatively low mutual correspondence of 25 % between ENJOY and NYTE, which indicates that there are clear areas of contrast across the two languages. These findings largely concur with Johansson’s (2007) findings about LOVE and HATE and their Norwegian counterparts ELSKE and HATE, indicating that some contrastive points are relevant for more than the individual verb pair.

References

Altenberg, B. (1999). “Adverbial connectors in English and Swedish: A corpus-based contrastive study”. In H. Hasselgård and S. Oksefjell (Eds) Out of corpora: Studies in honour of Stig Johansson, pp. 249-268. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Gilquin, G. (2000/1). “The ICM: Spicing up your data”. In S. Bernadini, H. Hasselgård & S. Johansson (Eds) Languages in Contrast. Vol 3 (1), pp. 95-123.
Granger, S. (1994). “From CA to CIA and back”. In K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg and M. Johansson (Eds), Languages in Contrast: Papers from a Symposium on Cross-linguistic Studies, pp. 37-52.
Hunston, S., & Francis, G. (2000). Pattern grammar : a corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English. Studies in Corpus Linguistics Vol. 4. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Johansson, S. (2007). “Loving and hating in English and Norwegian”. In Johansson (Ed) Seeing through Multilingual Corpora: On the use of corpora in contrastive studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sinclair, J. (1999). “A way with common words”. In H. Hasselgård and S. Oksefjell (Eds) Out of corpora: Studies in honour of Stig Johansson, pp. 157-179.

L2 development of -ing clauses: A longitudinal study of Norwegian learners

Hildegunn Dirdal (ILOS)

Time and place: Sep. 27, 2018 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM389

The English morpheme -ing features in many studies of progressive marking (e.g. Housen 2002, Robison 1990 and 1995, Rocca 2007, Rohde 1996), but other uses of -ing have received less attention and have usually been investigated in cross-sectional studies (Granger 1997, Biber and Reppen 1998, Tizón-Couto 2014). The present study focuses on the development of -ing clauses in L2 English by L1 Norwegian learners, building on a recent pseudo-longitudinal study by Wold (2017), who finds minimal use of -ing outside finite contexts among 11-year-olds and widespread use among 15-year-olds. A closer look at the use of -ing according to proficiency level reveals a path from no use outside finite contexts (A1 level), via a few uses after aspectual verbs (A2 level 11-year-olds), increased use after perception verbs and in adverbial functions (A2 level 15-year-olds), and finally an equal proportion of progressive and non-progressive uses (B level 15-year-olds). However, more knowledge is needed about the longitudinal development and the use of different types of -ing clauses.

The data for this study come from TRAWL: a longitudinal corpus of written texts from Norwegian school children, currently under construction. I use a combination of longitudinal case study of five pupils for whom we have data from four years (years 8–11) and a quasi-longitudinal study of texts from years 6–10 to answer the following questions:

Are there common stages in the development and use of -ing clauses?
Are there individual differences in the paths taken?
Can L1 influence be detected?

Following a usage-based and cognitive perspective, multiple factors are assumed to influence L2 learning, making distinct individual paths possible. However, similar educational practices and properties of the English language itself may lead to Norwegian learners showing evidence of common stages, possibly also based on their particular L1 background. Norwegian verbal nouns in -ing cannot project clauses, and present participle (V-ende/-ande) clauses are severely restricted compared to English -ing clauses (Dirdal 2017).

Results from both the quasi-longitudinal and the truly longitudinal study seem to confirm Wold’s finding that -ing clauses appear after the learners have started using -ing to mark the progressive. However, they have not necessarily mastered the form of the progressive before starting to use -ing clauses. Some students start using -ing clauses while still using bare -ing forms in finite contexts. The earliest uses of -ing clauses are as complements, particularly to catenatives, but also to other verbs, and to nouns and adjectives. Adjuncts and adnominal -ing clauses appear later, and subject -ing clauses are rare even in the later years. Individual differences are mainly related to pace, but there might also be differences in the order in which augmented and unaugmented adjuncts appear, and in the route to the use of adnominal -ing clauses. At no stage do the learners seem to restrict their use of -ing clauses in a way that mirrors the syntactic functions, semantic roles or internal syntax of Norwegian present participle clauses.

References

Biber, Doug and Randi Reppen. 1998. “Comparing Native and Learner Perspectives on English Grammar: A Study of Complement Clauses. In Learner English on Computer, edited by Sylviane Granger, 145–158. London: Longman.
Dirdal, Hildegunn. 2017. “Student translators and the challenge of -ing clauses.” Language, Learners and Levels: Progression and Variation. Corpora and Language in Use – Proceedings 3, edited by Pieter De Haan, Rina De Vries and Sanne Van Vuuren, 203–225. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain.
Granger, Sylviane. 1997. “On Identifying the Syntactic and Discourse Features of Participle Clauses in Academic English: Native and Non-native Writers Compared.” In Studies in English Language and Teaching: In Honor of Flor Aarts, edited by Jan Aarts, Inge de Mönnink and Herman Wekker, 185–198. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Housen, Alex. 2002. “The Development of Tense-Aspect in English as a Second Language and the Variable Influence of Inherent Aspect. In The L2 Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology, edited by M. Rafael Salaberry and Yasuhiro Shirai, 155–197. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Robison, Richard E. 1990. “The Primacy of Aspect: Aspectual Marking in English Interlanguage.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 12, no. 3: 315–330.
Robison, Richard E. 1995. “The Aspect Hypothesis Revisited: A Cross-sectional Study of Tense and Aspect Marking in Interlanguage.” Applied linguistics 16, no. 3: 344–370.
Rocca, Sonia. 2007. Child Second Language Acquisition: A Bi-directional Study of English and Italian Tense-Aspect Morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rohde, Andreas. 1996. “The Aspect Hypothesis and the Emergence of Tense Distinctions in Naturalistic L2 Acquisition.” Linguistics 34, no. 5: 1115–1137.
Tizón-Couto, Beatriz. 2014. Clausal Complements in Native and Learner Spoken English: A Corpus-based Study with Lindsei and Vicolse. Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication, no. 161. Bern: Peter Lang.
Wold, Stephanie Hazel Grønstad. 2017. INGlish English: The Progressive Construction in Learner Narratives. PhD diss., University of Bergen.

The uses of the intensifier 'absolutely' in the spoken BNC2014

Karin Aijmer, Göteborg University

Time and place: Oct. 25, 2018 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

Intensifiers are characterized by their rapid turn-over and constant state of renewal and therefore need to be studied in up-to-data spoken corpora. The starting-point for this study was the observation that the intensifier absolutely was more frequent in the SampleSpoken BNC2014 (Love et al 2017) in comparison with its use by previous generations of speakers in the (spoken component of) BNC from the 1990s. The changes undergone by absolutely have been given less consideration than recent changes involving really and so.

The aim of the present study is to describe the rise in frequency and changes which have taken place in the twenty-year period separating the two BNC corpora in a linguistic, discourse and a sociolinguistic perspective. The results will serve to give a picture of how frequency changes correlate with grammatical and semantic changes and contribute to the debate on the relationship between changes observable over a short diachronic period and long-term developments involving grammaticalization. The more specific research questions are:

What are the changes in the frequency of absolutely across the twenty-year period?
How are the changes reflected in the patterns of modification with different syntactic constituents (in particular nouns and verbs) and the free-standing absolutely?
Intensifiers put the spotlight on the adjective combining with absolutely. If absolutely is on the rise in present-day British English this may be indicated by the co-occurrence with trendy, age-related adjectives (brilliant, fucking, insane, knackered), and correlation with the positive or negative value of the adjective (semantic prosody).
How can the paths of change be described in terms of an increase in subjectivity (intensity) and principles of grammaticalization?
How can the dependent (intensifying) and independent (response item) uses of absolutely be explained as different stages of grammaticalization?
What is the role of the speakers’ age, gender and social class to explain the grammatical and semantic developments of absolutely (cf Murhpy 2007)?

Preliminary results show that absolutely is becoming less frequent as an adjectival modifier (30% of all the examples of absolutely to be compared with 45.6% in the ‘old’ BNC) and that it is expanding to new syntactic and semantic contexts in conversation where it performs discourse-oriented rather than intensifying functions. In particular it is used as a freestanding lexical item with the function of a response particle marking strong agreement (Tao 2007, Carretero 2010).

References

Carretero, M. 2010. ‘You’re absolutely right!!’ A corpus-based contrastive analysis of ‘absolutely’ in British English and absolutamente in Peninsular Spanish, with special emphasis on the relationship between degree and certainty. Languages in Contrast 10(2): 194–222.
Love, R., Dembry. C., Hardie. A., Brezina,V. and McEnery, T. . 2017. The Spoken BNC2014 – designing and building a spoken corpus of everyday conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22 (3):319-344.
Murphy, B. 2010. Corpus and sociolinguistics. Investigating age and gender in female talk. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Tao, H. 2007. A corpus-based investigation of absolutely and related phenomena in spoken American English. Journal of English Linguistics 35(5): 5–29.

2017

Ellipsis alternation: Analyzing syntactic variation

Joanna Nykiel, University of Silesia in Katowice

Time and place: Jan. 31, 2017 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

At the most general level, this presentation engages the question of which areas of syntax reflect not grammatical principles but other factors such as processing preferences (see Miller & Chomsky1963, Hofmeister & Sag 2010, Sprouse et al. 2012, Chaves 2013, Culicover 2013, Hofmeister et al. 2015). Culicover (2013), for instance, argues that if a structure that is licensed by the grammar is degraded or infrequent in certain contexts, then these facts should be explained by extragrammatical factors. Syntactic variation thus provides a likely locus of extra grammatical factors.

I address one instance of syntactic variation, an alternation characteristic of elliptical constructions, where Ps appearing in antecedent clauses may (1a) or may not be repeated (1b) in stranded phrases (remnants).

(1) a. A: Go change it.

B: To what?

A: To one of your old costumes.

b. A: Go change it.

B: To what?

A: One of your old costumes.

While available in a wide range of languages, this alternation is crosslinguistically unusual in English in that it shows a higher frequency of remnants without Ps than remnants with Ps (see Rodrigues et al. 2009, Merchant et al. 2013, Nykiel 2013, 2015, 2016, Abels 2016). I offer evidence from corpora of spoken US English that the frequency of remnants with Ps compared to the frequency of remnants without Ps is determined by processing preferences. I use a mixed-effects logistic regression model and conditional inference trees to analyze the data. The results speak in favor of analyzing this alternation as always grammatical (see Sag & Nykiel 2011, Boškovic 2013; for an alternative perspective, see Merchant 2001, 2004) but subject to processing constraints that affect the frequency of remnants, both in English and crosslinguistically.

A Perfect or a Preterit? Which one? And Why?

Gloria Otchere, ILOS

Time and place: Feb. 21, 2017 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

This talk discusses the effects of five linguistic factors – preceding tense, verb semantics, temporal adverbial, object form, clause type – on the choice of a Perfect via-à-vis a Preterit in locating events prior to speech time in Ghanaian English, British English and American English. Data for the study is drawn from the private conversation files of ICE-GH, ICE-GB and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, which, when completed, will form the spoken version of ICE-US. The data is analysed using binomial logistic regression. The results show that different factors constrain the choice of a Perfect vis-à-vis a Preterit in the three varieties of English.

Small-scale quotation databases as linguistic corpora: Further insights from the Bank of Canadian English

Stefan Dollinger, GU & UBC Vancouver

Time and place: Mar. 21, 2017 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

On March 17th, the new edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles was released (www.dchp.ca/dchp2). As a born-digital lexicographical project, this edition includes a number of features that will only be peripherally of interest to the present talk. Instead, we will take a close look at the quotations database behind the Dictionary, the Bank of Canadian English. While common for the OED, with its much larger scope (e.g. Fischer 1994, Beal and Grant 2006, Sigmund 2014), quotation databases have generally not been used for other varieties of English. Containing quotations from Canada from 1505 to 2016 (plus just one from 2017), the Bank of Canadian English consists of just about 2.7 million words but can be harnessed as a linguistic corpus more efficiently than its small size would suggest as result of its structural features.

I will present several case studies on the modal auxiliaries (Dollinger 2012, 2016) and on the subjunctive (Brinton 2015), besides some other features, in an effort to assess the database’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison to COHA for typical morphosyntactic variables. The general idea behind this talk is to "show you what we’ve got" and what we think corpus linguists might want do with it, especially those who are aiming to model post-colonial Englishes, where corpora are not always easy to come by (e.g. Bonness 2016, McCafferty & Amador-M. 2014, see Dollinger 2008 for the theoretical problems). As the database is available to researchers more generally, your input and feedback is actively encourage throughout the talk on what you would like to be able to do with North American, Canadian data (for some background see Dollinger 2010 access at https://www.academia.edu/5260736/).

Works cited

Beal, Joan C. and Anthony P. Grant. 2006. 'Make do and mend': an online investigation into processes of neologisation and the dearth of borrowing in newer English wartime vocabulary. In Syntax, Style and Grammatical Norms: English from 1500-2000, ed. by Christiane Dalton-Puffer, 55–72. Berne: Lang.
Bonness, Dania Jovana. 2016. 'There is a great many Irish Settlers here': Exploring Irish English diachronically using emigrant letters in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR). Ph.D. dissertation. Bergen: University of Bergen.
Brinton, Laurel J. 2015. Studying real-time change in the adverbial subjunctive: The value of the Bank of Canadian English. Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 4), ed. by Marina Dossena, 14–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2016. “The modals of obligation and necessity: development and change in North America since Late Modern times”. Manuscript.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2012. Canadian English in real-time perspective. In: English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook. Vol. II. (HSK 34.2), ed. by Alexander Bergs & Laurel Brinton, 1858–1880. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2010. Software from the Bank of Canadian English as an open source tool for the dialectologist: ling.surf and its features. In Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary and Beyond: Studies in Late Modern English Dialectology, ed. by Manfred Markus, Clive Upton and Reinhard Heuberger, 249–261. Berne: Peter Lang.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2008. Taking permissible shortcuts? Limited evidence, heuristic reasoning and the modal auxiliaries in early Canadian English. In: Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change, ed. by Susan Fitzmaurice and Donka Minkova, 357–385. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
McCafferty, Kevin and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno. 2014. ‘[The Irish] find much difficulty in these auxiliaries . . . putting will for shall with the first person’: the decline of first-person shall in Ireland, 1760–1890. English Language & Linguistics 18(3): 407–429.
Siemund, Peter. 2014. The emergence of English reflexive verbs: an analysis based on the Oxford English Dictionary. English Language and Linguistics 18: 49–73.

TraWL (Tracking Written Learner language): Corpus design and research plans

Anne-Line Graedler (INN), Sylvi Rørvik (INN), Ingrid Kristine Hasund (UiA), Eli-Marie Drange (UiA), Hildegunn Dirdal (UiO)

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2017 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

Second/foreign language (L2) proficiency is at present a major competence area in both educational and general human development. The TraWL project aims to investigate the development of written language competence in L2 languages learnt in Norwegian schools throughout the education journey, based on a large and structured set of authentic pupil texts. A longitudinal corpus of texts written by pupils in primary and secondary school is currently being compiled to form the basis for this research and will later also be made available to other researchers and educators.

We will give examples of the types of texts that have been collected so far, describe the design of the corpus, different data types, etc., and how we are planning to continue the corpus compilation. We will also talk about what kind of research we aim to carry out on the German, Spanish, French and English data respectively. The main project purpose is to contribute to a deeper insight into pupils’ competence in L2, especially about how different factors interact to create developmental paths and textual competence, about universal vs. individual stages of language acquisition and the interactive development of different aspects of language. This is in accordance with a recent objective which encourages a much closer cooperation between the slightly different academic fields, Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Learner Corpus Research (LCR); cf. e.g. Myles (2015).

Reference

Myles, F. (2015). Second language acquisition theory and learner corpus research. In S. Granger, G. Gilquin & F. Meunier (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research. Cambridge: CUP.

Attribution in novice academic English

Time and place: Sep. 26, 2017 4:15 PM–5:30 PM, PAM 489

Attribution (the direct acknowledgement of external sources in academic texts) is investigated in two corpora of novice academic English, representing first- and second-language writing in linguistics, viz. the VESPA corpus and the BAWE corpus. Findings from these corpora are compared to published academic writing in both English and Norwegian (the learners’ first language) within the same discipline. The major findings include the underrepresentation of academic attribution in the learner texts compared to both novice and expert first-language writing but a similar proportional distribution of integral and non-integral attribution across the corpora, as in (1) and (2), respectively. Reporting verbs are found to express mostly positive or neutral attitudes to the cited content; however, the evaluative potential seems to be exploited less by Norwegian writers (L1 expert and L2 novice) than by L1 English writers.

(1) As Eggins (2004) states, this kind of contrastive analysis is useful… (BAWE)

(2) In general, labels are "unspecific and requires lexical realisation in its immediate context, either beforehand or afterwards." (Francis 1994: 162). (VESPA)

Keywords: academic English, attribution, Norwegian learners of English

Secretary letter-shapes in County Durham

Jacob Thaisen, ILOS

Time and place: Oct. 31, 2017 4:15 PM, PAM-489

This study applies quantitative methods in palaeography. It develops tree-structured regression models of the palaeographical variation found in a synchronic corpus of texts written in orthographically less standardised late Middle English and establishes their accuracy. There are sixteen models, each one relating to a letter-shape known to distinguish the Gothic cursive scripts Anglicana and Secretary. The models predict the presence of the individual letter-shape from one or more of the following variables, in no particular order: (1) localisation of texts’ orthographic variation; (2) text-type; and (3) in-word position. The discussion asks why several Secretary letter-shapes cluster in documents localisable to County Durham and the area further north, given the script’s association with (a) institutions of national administration in the London-Westminster area and (b) orthographic standardisation. It concludes that the linguistics and the palaeography do not co-vary during this period in the history of the English language and suggests that it may illuminate studies of the gradient between Anglicana and Secretary to pay attention to provincial centres, not least Durham.

A Multifactorial Analysis of Anaphoric Choice in Translated Chinese

Xiuling Xu, Beijing Foreign Studies University / ILOS

Time and place: Nov. 28, 2017 4:15 PM, PAM-389

Corpus-based translation studies have so far been largely confined to lexical and grammatical levels. Textual features, however, are rarely dealt with in previous studies. The present study therefore aims to explore the use of anaphora, a linguistic feature at the textual level, in Chinese translated from English as compared with non-translated native Chinese.

Anaphoric devices in Chinese can be broadly classified into three types, i.e. nominal, pronominal, and zero anaphora, and the choice of these three types of anaphoric devices is not at random but instead is influenced by semantic, syntactic, and discourse factors (e.g. animacy of the referent, syntactic roles of the antecedent and the anaphor, referential distance, potential interference). Although anaphoric choice in native Chinese has been widely investigated, not much attention has been paid to anaphoric choice in translated Chinese. As previous studies have revealed that language use in translated texts differs systematically from language use in non-translated texts, it is therefore worthwhile to compare the factors affecting anaphoric choice in translated Chinese with those in native Chinese, so as to unveil the distinct features of translated Chinese. The present study will adopt the multifactorial statistical approach (cf. Gries 2013) to investigate the concurrent influence of multiple factors that work together to result in the writer/translator’s final choice of one anaphoric type over the others. Multifactorial analysis enables us to quantify the contribution of each factor as well as the interactions between factors. The present study will help us understand the features of translated Chinese from the textual level, and offer more insights into the constraints under which translation activity is operated.

Keywords: anaphoric choice; translated Chinese; multifactorial analysis

Xiuling Xu is a visiting PhD student staying at ILOS for all of this academic year. In her talk she will give an outline of her ongoing PhD work, including a presentation of her translation corpus and annotation scheme.

2016

On loss of case in English

Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden, ILOS

Time and place: Feb. 1, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, PAM 489

Most accounts of the history of the English language state that loss of case and other inflectional endings was sudden, and invoke as evidence the earliest Middle English (ME) texts, the Peterborough Chronicle (c. 1120-54) and the Ormulum (c. 1175). This loss, they claim, changed the nature of English dramatically, from a highly synthetic to a highly analytic language (Baugh & Cable 2005).

As for the cause(s) of this loss, a variety of suggestions have been made. One is that the vowels of unstressed syllables were neutralised, blurring their meaning, leading to the development of analytical constructions. Other suggestions point to a language contact situation, in which it is assumed that English inflection was simplified in a pidginisation process (Bailey & Maroldt 1977; Poussa 1982). Yet, evidence of confusion between historically distinct inflectional endings is found even in latish Old English (OE), in texts from an area presumably far away from the scene of Viking or Norman conquest (the Old English Orosius, Bately 1980). Hence, inflectional loss may not have been as sudden as the conventional story maintains. This bears directly on linguists’ demarcation of the OE and ME ‘periods’ and on our understanding of what constitutes OE or ME.

Additionally, the claim that OE was highly synthetic is challenged by Benskin (2001); Cuesta (2004) shows that the alleged discontinuity between Old Northumbrian and Northern ME has been overstated; and Kitson (1997) believes that ‘the ME period’ started later than assumed. Allen (1997) assesses the degree to which inflectional endings survive in early ME texts and are used to convey syntactic and semantic meaning.

This paper seeks to establish (a) to what extent OE and ME differed in terms of being synthetic or analytic, (b) dates for the beginning of the loss of cases and inflectional endings, and (c) the rate at which this loss progressed, making use of e.g. LAEME (Laing 2008).

References

Allen, C.L. 1997. ‘Middle English case loss and the creolization hypothesis’. English Language and Linguistics 1/1: 63-89.
Bailey, C. J. & K. Maroldt. 1977. ‘The French lineage of English’. In: Meisel, J.M. (ed.). Langues en contact: Pidgins,Creoles; Languages in Contact; 21-53. Tübingen: Narr.
Bately, J. 1980. The Old English Orosius. Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series 6. London: Oxford University Press.
Baugh, A.C. & T. Cable. 2005. A History of the English Language. Oxford: Routledge.
Benskin, M. 2001. [Review article] ‘A New History of Early English: Hans Frede Nielsen: A Journey Through the History of the English Language in England and America, Volume I: The Continental Backgrounds of English and its Insular Development until 1154. NOWELE, Supplement volume 19, Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 19: 93-122.
Cuesta, J.F. 2004. ‘The (Dis)continuity between Old Northumbrian and Northern Middle English’. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 49: 233-244.
Kitson, P. 1997. ‘When did Middle English begin? Later than you think!’ In: Fisiak, J. (ed.) Studies in Middle English Linguistics; 221-269. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Laing, M. 2008. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html
Poussa, P. 1982. ‘The Evolution of Early Standard English: The Creolization Hypothesis.’ Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 14: 69-85.

Intertextual variation in Old and Middle English

Øystein Heggelund, HSN

Time and place: Feb. 29, 2016 2:15 PM, PAM489

The existence of word order differences between individual authors in Old and Middle English is well known (eg Mitchell 1985, Eitler 2005, Eitler & Westergaard 2014). A number of factors may influence the syntax of individuals, including social status and target audience. Nevertheless, many empirical investigations of earlier English word order have focused on just one or two texts from each time period, and may not be sufficiently representative.

English changed from a language with a strong V2 constraint in main clauses to a V3/subject-verb language in the course of Middle English. In subordinate clauses, which my paper focuses on, the shift was one from a mix between verb-final and subject–verb to overwhelmingly subject–verb (eg Kohonen 1978, Pintzuk 1999, Bech 2001). In the transition period between the old and the new order, synchronic variation is expected, both intratextually and intertextually. In this paper, 2,400 clauses from four late Old English (lOE, 950–1100) texts and six early Middle English (eME, 1100–1300) texts are analysed, in order to find out how much word order variation there is between different texts with different authors.

The analysis reveals a high degree of variation between texts from the same period. Interestingly, the variation appears to be relatively independent of dialect and genre. Consequently, conclusions about the speed and nature of the word order change in English should be based on a wide selection of texts by different authors. Moreover, the analysis indicates that both lOE and eME are very heterogeneous with respect to word order, and that the change in English word order must have been slow and gradual. As such, the findings lend support to the variationist paradigm currently dominating English historical syntax.

References

Bech, Kristin. 2001. Word order patterns in Old and Middle English: a syntactic and pragmatic study. Doctoral dissertation, University of Bergen.
Eitler, Tamás. 2005. Some dialectal, sociolectal and communicative aspects of word order variation and change in Late Middle English. In Michael Fortescue, Eva Skafte Jensen, Jens Erik Mogensen & Lene Schøsler (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2003: Selected papers from the 16th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Copenhagen, 11–15 August 2003, 87–102. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eitler, Tamás & Marit Westergaard. 2014. Word order variation in late Middle English. In Kristin Bech & Kristine Gunn Eide (eds.), Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages, 203–32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kohonen, Viljo. 1978. On the development of English word order in religious prose around 1000 and 1200 A.D.: a quantitative study of word order in context (Meddelanden från Stiftelsens för Åbo Akademi Forskningsinstitut 38). Åbo: Research Institute of the Åbo Akademi Foundation.
Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pintzuk, Susan. 1999. Phrase structures in competition: variation and change in Old English word order. New York: Garland.

Past time in English, Norwegian and German (with a side glance at Swedish [and Danish])

Johan Elsness, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 4, 2016 2:15 PM, PAM 489

A great many languages have two major verb forms used to refer to past time: a periphrastic (analytic) present perfect and a synthetic preterite. That is true of all the five languages mentioned in the title of this talk. However, the distribution of the two verb forms varies among these languages: The use of the present perfect is held to be most restrictive in English, most widespread in German. Indeed, in southern dialects of German the preterite seems to be in the process of being ousted by the present perfect, a development which appears to be spreading northwards to other German-speaking areas. In a past-specified English sentence like He came yesterday, the present perfect would be an unacceptable alternative to the preterite, while das Präsensperfekt is straightforward in the corresponding German sentence: Er ist gestern gekommen.

The five languages differ also when it comes to the functional division line between the present perfect and the simple present: German and Swedish, but not (usually) the other three languages, can have the simple present tense in references to left- or length-specified time extending from the past up to, and possibly through, the present time-field: Er wohnt seit 2008 / seit acht Jahren in Berlin, Sedan 2008 / Sedan åtta år bor han i Berlin.

Even the form of the present perfect varies among the five languages: (Present-day) English and Swedish can have only a HAVE verb as the perfect auxiliary; German and Danish use both their HAVE and their BE verbs with the perfect, with a pretty strict, and similar, line of division; while Norwegian also uses both perfect auxiliaries, but with a much less strict division (and that is true of both official variants of Norwegian!).

In the study to be reported in this talk the use of the two verb forms is investigated in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) and in three of the other sections making up the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC), i.e. the sections consisting of English, Norwegian and German original texts plus their respective translations into the two other languages. Some high-frequency verbs are selected for the more detailed analysis, which reveals that, in spite of some pretty marked differences in overall frequencies between the three languages, the variation in the ratio between the present perfect and the preterite follows a remarkably similar pattern in the three languages. This variation seems to have a semantic basis and is explained with reference to the likely telicity of each of the verbs investigated.

The development of the distribution between the present perfect and the preterite is seen in the light of what has been claimed to be a general tendency for the preterite to disappear in Indo-European languages, which in turn can be seen as part of an even more general tendency for languages to develop from a synthetic towards an analytic structure. In the particular case of English, however, higher-level factors are pointed to which can help to explain why that language may seem to be bucking the general trend as far as the distribution between the present perfect and the preterite is concerned.

"Your mum!" Swearing by mother in English, Spanish and Norwegian teenage talk

Kristine Hasund, Universitetet i Agder

Time and place: May 2, 2016 2:15 PM, PAM 489

Access to three audiorecorded corpora of spontaneous teenage conversation provided an opportunity to study the use of 'swearing by mother' in such diverse languages as English, Spanish and Norwegian (Drange, Hasund & Stenström 2014, Hasund, Drange & Stenström 2014). The corpora used were The Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAm), and Språkkontakt och Ungdomsspråk i Norden (UNO-Oslo). The study is quantitative as well as qualitative. The classification of the pragmatic functions of swearing is based on Ljung (2011), who makes a distinction between ritual insults, name-calling, expletive interjections and intensifiers, all of which are either sexually offending or refer to unattractive personal qualities.

It appeared that, while the Spanish swearing consisted almost exclusively of expressions to do with prostitution, the English and Norwegian swearing was much more varied. Swearing by mother turned out to be particularly common in Spanish, less common in English and extremely infrequent in Norwegian. The reason for the Spanish dominance seems to be that the Spanish expressions have undergone a long process of fixation and routinization. A classic example is puta madre ('whore mother), which has developed from a negative to a positive expression, as in es un tío de puta madre ('he's a fantastic guy'). An interesting finding is that swearing by mother was used by girls as well as boys in all age groups, which is in line with the gender levelling that is going on with respect to swearing in general.

References

Drange, E-M., Hasund, I.K. & Stenström, A-B. 2014. “’Your mum!’ Teenagers’ use of mother swearwords in English, Spanish and Norwegian”. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19:1, 29-59.
Hasund, I.K., Drange, E-M. & Stenström, A-B. 2014. "The pragmatic functions of swearing by mother in English, Spanish and Norwegian teenage talk”. In Rathje, M (ed.) Swearing in the Nordic countries. Copenhagen 6 December 2012. Sprognævnets konferenceserie 2. København: Dansk Sprognævn, 11-35.
Ljung, M. 2011. Swearing. A Cross-cultural Linguistic Study. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Looking for missing objects in corpora

Heidi Jansen and Diana Santos

Time and place: Sep. 1, 2016 4:15 PM, PAM 389

Heidi Jansen presents her master's thesis in the Portuguese language, where she deals with the null object in Portuguese and uses a corpus-based approach.

In her research, she has used modern and older text corpora, bilingual translation corpora, oral (transcribed) corpora, historical corpora and Portuguese and Brazilian grammar books, in an attempt to describe and get the best possible overview of this grammatical phenomenon and how it is actually used and was used in practice in Portuguese.

In addition to presenting her experiences and findings, we would like to talk about the methodological problem of finding "absence" instead of "presence" in the corpus.

Modelling spelling variation from electronic diplomatic transcripts

Jacob Thaisen, ILOS

Time and place: Sep. 29, 2016 4:15 PM, PAM 489

The presentation demonstrates the adequacy of N-gram model perplexity, a standard metric in natural language processing, as an objective similarity metric for Middle English spelling data, despite the lexical differences between texts. N-gram models have rarely been constructed for the variable spelling systems characteristic of Middle English, most likely because a successful model presupposes a sizable body of training data. The tradition has instead been for the researcher to assess similarity based on visual, predominantly qualitative, comparison of spelling forms of selected words collected from samples of texts. Diplomatic transcripts of longer medieval English texts are increasingly becoming available in electronic form. Their arrival promises full models optimised through smoothing and interpolation as a basis for quantification and rigid testing. My examples of the adequacy of the perplexity metric are relevant to textual studies. For example, a scribe’s spelling is always biased in the direction of his exemplars. This bias opens up a window on the number of scribes behind the exemplars for a text executed in a single hand, when other factors such as authorship and poetic form are held constant.

A functional comparison of recurrent word-combinations in English original vs. translated texts

Signe Oksefjell Ebeling og Jarle Ebeling

Time and place: Oct. 27, 2016 4:15 PM, PAM 489

The presentation explores the potential of quantitative methods to shed light on how texts originally written in English (EO) and texts translated into English (ET) from Norwegian cluster in terms of functional classes. The object of study are sequences of three words (3-grams), classified into 15 functional categories. The investigation establishes that EO and ET do not differ significantly in half of the categories. As for the categories that yield a statistically significant result, two (Comparison and Spatial) are investigated in more detail, uncovering that the more frequent use of Comparison and Spatial 3-grams in ET is most likely a result of source language shining through. The findings are important in the context of both descriptive translation studies and translation-based contrastive studies. With regard to the former, the current study shows that, in many cases, ET does not seem to constitute a “third code” at the level of 3-gram functions, since the same functions are equally attested in EO. As far as contrastive studies are concerned, the investigation reveals few, if any, lexico-grammatical differences between EO and ET that overturn the belief that translations are a good tertium comparationis when comparing and contrasting language systems.

Corpus studies of noun modifiers in early Germanic

Kristin Bech, ILOS

Time and place: Nov. 24, 2016 4:15 PM, PAM 389

This (ca. 50-minute) talk is in two parts. First it reports on a collaborative project in which we consider noun phrase modifiers in the early Germanic languages Old English, Old Icelandic, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Gothic. Our starting point is the striking divergence in the literature on canonical order. For early Germanic languages in general, modifier-noun is reported as the default order, while for Old Norse, noun-modifier is allegedly the neutral order. This is unexpected given their common ancestry and similarities in current varieties. We have carried out corpus studies to compare the languages, and find that the only outlier is Gothic.

Since our joint project only considered Old Icelandic, I wanted to find out whether Old Norwegian behaves in the same way as Old Icelandic, so I queried the Menotec corpus located in INESS. The second part of the talk thus focuses on this work (still in early stages), and includes a demonstration of some of the queries used. In general, the talk shows that testing old claims against new corpora might be a good idea.

2015

Corpus Pattern Analysis: verbs vs. nouns

Patrick Hanks

Thursday 5 February 14.15-16, Room 6 PAM

In this talk, I focus on some of the differences in function and meaning between nouns and verbs, as revealed by corpus analysis. The grammatical framework used is based on Halliday's "slot and filler" approach of the 1960s, which has proven more useful for lexical analysis than other approaches such as generative grammar. (See Halliday 1961 "Categories of the Theory of Grammar".) A useful starting point is that the central and typical function of nouns is to create referring expressions – terms that either refer to objects in the world or denote abstract concepts. The central and typical function of verbs, on the other hand, is to create propositions, in which nouns and noun phrases play roles that are mediated by a verb. According to the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (Hanks, 1994, 2004, 2013), a verb has only meaning potential (not meaning per se) until it is put in context. There is no 'semantic invariable' that is common to all normal uses of a verb such as blow. 'A gale was blowing', 'They blew up the bridge', 'He blew his nose', and 'She blew the whistle on government malpractice' have little or nothing in common, but all four sentences represent realizations of conventional lexico-syntactic patterns of English.

A consequence of this is that quite different questions must be asked about nouns from verbs, and quite different apparatuses are required for corpus analysis of the two categories. If shower is used as a noun, we can ask, how many different kinds of shower are there – rain showers, snow showers, spring showers, bathroom showers, etc. – and what distinctive properties or common features do they have? On the other hand, if shower is used as a verb, relevant question are prompted by the collocates in the various clause roles in relation to the verb: Is it normal to say in English, "It was showering all afternoon"? Or we might notice the frequency of patterns with certain prepositions, and ask, Who showers what on whom? Who showers whom with what? What, if any is the semantic and syntagmatic relationship between these two prepositional structures?

In this way, we can inch our way painfully towards compiling an inventory of patterns of word uses that is already available to the unconscious minds of most users of the language.

Lexical variation in connector use

Sylvi Rørvik, Hedmark University College

Thursday 26 March at 14.15 in PAM 489

In this talk I will present results from an ongoing investigation into lexical variation in connector use. The material consists of argumentative texts from three "varieties" of English: L1 expert texts (opinion pieces from newspapers), L1 novice texts (from the LOCNESS corpus), and L2 novice texts (from the Norwegian component of the International Corpus of Learner English).

My primary goal is to describe the connector use of the Norwegian learners, in comparison with the two native varieties. Previous research has shown that advanced learners of English may both overuse and underuse connectors compared to native speakers (NS). For instance, Swedish learners underuse connectors (Altenberg & Tapper 1998), while learners from various other L1 backgrounds overuse connectors (cf. Milton & Shuk-ching Tsang 1993, Granger & Tyson 1996, Gilquin & Paquot 2008, and Paquot 2008). However, most of these studies stress the fact that learners may overuse certain lexical items and underuse others. Thus, in order to examine whether learners overuse or underuse connectors, we must take into account the actual lexical items used, and examine them individually. As regards Norwegian learners, they have been shown to overuse connectors (defined as co-ordinating conjunctions and conjunct adverbials) overall compared to native speakers (Rørvik 2013), but it remains to be seen whether this overuse is a general tendency, or whether it is caused by overuse of some individual lexical items (and possibly underuse of others).

A further issue, which remains largely unaddressed in the literature, is the question of the dispersion within the corpora, be they native or learner, on which such conclusions about over- and underuse are based. I would like to use the opportunity afforded by this talk to discuss potential solutions to this problem, taking examples from my study of connector use as the starting point.

Adverbial clauses in English and Norwegian

Hilde Hasselgård, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 16, 2015 2:15 PM, PAM 489

I will present an investigation of the position and the information structure of adverbial clauses in relation to their matrix clauses in English and Norwegian. The study focuses on two genres, fiction and news reportage, and is primarily based on original text in both languages. Translations in the ENPC have been consulted where English and Norwegian originals differ markedly. The adverbial clauses are annotated for their syntactic and semantic type (finite vs. non-finite; time, contingency, manner, etc.), position (Initial, Medial, End) and information structure. The following hypotheses are tested:

The languages will have different positional preferences: Norwegian will use initial position more often than English (Diessel 2001, Hasselgård 2014a & b).
News will have a greater proportion of its adverbial clauses in initial position than fiction (Hasselgård 2014a).
Different syntactic and semantic types of clauses may have different positional preferences, and the preferences may vary between languages and genres.
Adverbial clauses containing given information are more likely to be sentence-initial; those containing new information are more likely to be sentence-final (Ford 1993, Ford & Thompson 1986).
Text strategies, especially ‘experiential iconicity’ (Enkvist 1981) and thematic structure (Fries 2004) are also likely to determine the order.

Material

The British part of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB)
The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC)
A collection of news articles from Norwegian online newspapers

References

Altenberg, Bengt. 1987. Causal ordering strategies in English conversation. In Monaghan, J. (ed.) Grammar in the Construction of Texts. London: Francis Pinter, 50-64.
Diessel, Holger. 2001. The ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses: A typological study. Language, 77:2, 433-55.
Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1981. Experiential iconicism in text strategy. Text, 1 (1), 97-111.
Ford, Cecilia E. 1993. Grammar in Interaction. Adverbial clauses in American English conversations. Cambridge University Press.
Fries, P.H. 2004. A personal view of Theme. In M. Ghadessy (ed.) Thematic Development in English Texts. London and New York: Pinter, 1-19.
Hasselgård, Hilde. 2010. Adjunct Adverbials in English. Cambridge University Press.
Hasselgård, Hilde. 2014a. Discourse-structuring functions of initial adverbials in English and Norwegian news and fiction. In M.-A. Lefer & S. Vogeleer (eds), Genre- and register-related discourse features in contrast, Special issue of Languages in Contrast 14.1, 73-92.
Hasselgård, Hilde. 2014b. Conditional clauses in English and Norwegian. In H.P. Helland & C.M. Salvesen (eds) Affaire(s) de Grammaire. Oslo: Novus, 183-200.

Marked language in translation

Siri Fürst Skogmo, ILOS

Thursday 7th May at 14.15 in PAM 489

In 1995, Gideon Tory claimed that there is a “law of growing standardisation” within translation, which he elaborates in this way: “Textual relations obtaining in the original are often modified, sometimes to the point of being totally ignored, in favour of [more] habitual options offered by a target repertoire” (1995: 268). While his decision to use the term “law” has been criticised, the idea that markedness is lost in translation has not been challenged, even by his most ardent opponents. Mona Baker refers to the same phenomenon under the term “normalization”, which she describes as “a tendency to exaggerate the features of the target language and to conform to its typical patterns” (1996: 183).

The claim that translations tend be more “standard”, less creative and show less linguistic variation is supported by evidence from larger corpus investigations (by for example Dorothy Kenny and Sara Laviosa) as well as studies of individual literary works in translation (by for example Kirsten Malmkjær and Mary Snell-Hornby). There are very few studies where translations are found to challenge the linguistic/literary norms of the target culture (a notable exception being Laura Routti’s study of the Finnish translations of A Catcher in the Rye).

In my study, I investigate the translation of marked language in seven novels originally published in English, translated into Norwegian in the last 35 years by seven different translators. The focus of my investigation is twenty-odd different marked features, ranging from loanwords via tag questions to deviation in word order, and the shifts that happen in the translation of these features into Norwegian.

Learning to translate -ing clauses

Hildegunn Dirdal

Tuesday 8 September at 2.15pm, NT 706

English -ing clauses are both frequent and multifunctional, and represent a challenge to Norwegian translators since Norwegian does not have an equivalent structure. There are studies of the translation of adjunct -ing clauses by professionals (e.g. Behrens 1998, Behrens and Fabricius-Hansen 2005, Fuhre 2010, Smith 2004), but none dealing with novice translators. Finding out more about the particular challenges that novices face, could be beneficial in the teaching of translation to Norwegian students.

This study uses a collection of master thesis in literary translation and compares them with translations by professionals with the aim to find out

how comparable the ranges of solutions are,
whether novices struggle with -ing clauses,
whether certain types of clauses cause more difficulty than others, and
how the problems can be described.

References

Behrens, B. 1998. Contrastive discourse: An interlingual approach to the interpretation and translation of free ING-participial adjuncts. PhD diss., University of Oslo.
Behrens, B. and C. Fabricius-Hansen. 2005. The relation Accompanying Circumstance across languages. Conflict between linguistic expression and discourse subordination? SPRIKreports 32. Oslo: University of Oslo. [Accessed 08.10.2014]
Fuhre, P. 2010. The English -ing Participial Free Adjunct in Original and Translated Fiction: An English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus Study. Master’s thesis, University of Oslo.
Smith, M.-B. Marthinsen. 2004. Initial -ing Clauses in English and Their Translation into Norwegian. Master’s thesis, University of Oslo.

"Hinna bry sig" – Seeing Swedish "hinna" through the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus

Lene Nordrum, Lund University

Time and place: Sep. 29, 2015 2:15 PM, NT706

A number of Swedish verbs can function both as main verbs and auxiliaries. Such polyfunctionality has been related to diachronic language change, such as the transition of Swedish from a primarily synthetic to an analytic language, where lexical verbs have been grammaticalized into auxiliaries that replace morphological marking (Lagervall 2013:10; Wessén 1965 III:142f). In my talk, I will consider the Swedish verb hinna and its English translation correspondences in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. Despite its Germanic origin, hinna lacks a straightforward correspondence in English, and the English translations are thus used to shed light on its meaning and use, as described in the method ‘seeing language through multilingual corpora’ (Johansson 2007). I will argue that the English translations support a semantic description of hinna as vague rather than polysemous, which means that context can bring salience to one of two meaning components [ABILITY] or [TIME-SUFFICIENCY], but that we cannot speak of two distinctly separated semantic senses.

The pragmatics of legal language

Nicholas Allott (joint work with Ben Shaer)

Time and place: Oct. 27, 2015 2:15 PM, NT706

This talk summarises ongoing joint work with Ben Shaer (Carleton University, Canada) on the structure and, particularly, pragmatics of legal language. In a series of papers, we have looked at three different types of legal texts from the common law, English language, legal tradition: legal notices; statutes and regulations; and adjudications made by judges.

We make two general claims. The first is that in legal texts, what you see is (largely) what you get. Thus, apparently sub-sentential legal notices are really fragments; and provisions in statutes have only their face-value illocutionary force: they create new social facts and (contra various scholars) are not indirect orders. Our second general claim is that the interpretation of legal texts such as statutes is of a piece with utterance interpretation more generally as it is understood in (post-)Gricean pragmatics. More specifically, interpretation of a legal text is a species of inference to the best explanation, where the production of the text is what is to be explained and the explanation is in general a matter of what it was that the utterer intended to communicate.

As I will show, our rather theoretical conclusions about the three types of text are backed by analysis of real-world examples. I hope that members of the group may be able to advise us on ways of working with the corpora that are available to us, particularly online collections of statutes and judicial adjudications.

Investigating individual pause profiles through the use of a comparable NL1/IL corpus

Hege Larsson Aas, Hedmark University College

Tuesday 24 November at 14:15 in NT 706

This talk presents the results of a study exploring the use of unfilled pauses in spoken texts by Norwegian non-native speakers of English. It also presents a small corpus currently under compilation that will allow for contrastive analyses between data from a speaker’s native- (NL1) and interlanguage (IL) production. The study addresses the following research question: Are there differences between the pause profiles of individuals within an IL group that can be attributed to conventions in their NL1 or to individual variation?

The need for contrastive analyses including native language data from interlanguage speakers is increasingly acknowledged (Chambers, 1997; Segalowitz, 2010), but few learner corpora have been compiled with such an NL1 baseline in mind. From the perspective of fluency research, Segalowitz (2010) observes that individual differences “have provided an unwanted source of noise that may have masked important L2 fluency phenomena” (p. 35). Corpora containing native speech from IL informants make it possible to partly filter out this noise, and allow us to record patterns that are “common to both languages and hence is not specific to the L2” (ibid., p. 36). NL1 data is also included in Gilquin’s (2008) model of transfer, where this contrast is seen as a key to detecting cross-linguistic influence on a group level: “Only if one can establish a similarity between the learner’s behaviour in IL and NL1 does the presence of transfer seem plausible enough” (p. 13). This study applies the contrastive approach to the paralinguistic phenomenon of pausing, and explores the suggestion made by Raupach (1980) that “speakers have a strong inclination to transfer their pause profile from L1 to L2 performance” (p. 270).

Results from a pilot analysis of nine IL samples from the (forthcoming) Norwegian component of the Louvain Database of spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin, De Cock, & Granger, 2010) showed that the interlanguage speakers spent more time pausing than their target native language (NL2) peers, and differences in IL and NL2 pausing patterns are also found in other studies using similar data (e.g. Götz, 2013). This potential “fluency gap” (Segalowitz, 2010) is often attributed to the cognitive demands of speaking in an L2, which may lead to greater hesitation even in the speech of highly proficient non-native speakers. However, a speaker’s pausing behaviour can also be related to her general cognitive capacities (e.g. working memory) (ibid.), individual preferences (Fillmore, 1979), or language-specific conventions governing the paralinguistic aspects of speech (Derwing, Munro, Thomson, & Rossiter, 2009; Riazantseva, 2001). Cross-linguistic analyses including NL1 data are thus needed to detect alternative explanations for such pausing patterns.

By describing individual pause profiles in both NL1 and IL, the study aims to contribute to our understanding of this aspect of fluency both generally and in relation to the particular interlanguage group. It also forms the basis for qualitative research into the use and functions of unfilled pauses in interlanguage.

References

Chambers, F. (1997). What do we mean by fluency? System, 25(4), 535-544.
Derwing, T. M., Munro, M. J., Thomson, R. I., & Rossiter, M. J. (2009). The relationship between L1 fluency and L2 fluency development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 31(4), 533-557.
Fillmore, C. J. (1979). On Fluency. In C. J. Fillmore, D. Kempler & W. S.-Y. Wang (Eds.), Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behaviour (pp. 85-101). New York: Academic Press.
Gilquin, G. (2008). Combining contrastive and interlanguage analysis to apprehend transfer. Detection, explanation, evaluation. In G. Gilquin, S. Papp & M. B. Díez-Bedmar (Eds.), Linking up contrastive and learner corpus research (pp. 3-33).
Gilquin, G., De Cock, S., & Granger, S. (2010). Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
Götz, S. (2013). Fluency in native and nonnative English speech. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Raupach, M. (1980). Temporal variables in first and second language speech production. In H. W. Dechert & M. Raupach (Eds.), Temporal Variables in Speech. Studies in Honour of Frieda Goldman-Eisler (pp. 263-270). The Hague: Mouton Publishers.
Riazantseva, A. (2001). Second language proficiency and pausing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 497-526.
Segalowitz, N. (2010). Cognitive bases of second language fluency. New York: Routledge.

2014

Investigating typical features of spoken interactions in the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI)

Sylvie De Cock, Université catholique de Louvain

Tid og sted: 3 February 2014, 16:15, NT 706

This paper sets out to explore a number of typical features of informal spoken interactions in informal interviews with upper-intermediate to advanced EFL learners included in the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI, Gilquin et al. 2010). The features include, among others, some reduced and contracted forms, sentential relative clauses, evaluative adjectives and a series of discourse markers. Some of the features under study are also investigated in a comparable corpus of interviews with native speakers of English, the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation (LOCNEC, De Cock 2004). The paper also examines the impact of the interview format on some of the results and discusses some implications of the findings for English language teaching.

References

De Cock, Sylvie. 2004. Preferred Sequences of Words in NS and NNS Speech. Belgian Journal of English Language and Literatures New Series 2, 225-246.
Gilquin, G., De Cock, S. & Granger, S. (eds). 2010. The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain.

First steps of Gramateca: a corpus-based grammar initiative for Portuguese, driven by Linguateca

Diana Santos

Thursday 20 February 2014, 14.15; room 489 PAM

In this presentation, I will describe the goals and what we intend to accomplish with the Gramateca initiative, which you can read about at http://www.linguateca.pt/Gramateca/

I will describe the team and the different things people want to do, the funding and publication policies, and the most important criterion: that the analyses done remain publicly available so that others can improve on them and give different interpretations if they feel the need to.

I will also discuss some of the problems and the way we intend to solve them with the on-going activity of semantic annotation, human revision, and parser improvement, which are a substantial concern for those who do corpus-based work that is intended to be replicable.

Some specific examples of the studies that have been started will also be presented if time permits.

In order to spice up the presentation, I will try to contrast it with the corpus-based grammar published by Longman in 1999, by Stig Johansson and others.

The pragmatic annotation of a corpus of academic lectures

Siân Alsop, Coventry University

Thursday 27 March, 2.15pm, PAM 489

This paper uses data from the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC) to discuss similarities and differences in the structure and functions of English-medium engineering lectures delivered in different parts of the world. Transcripts of 76 lectures from the UK, Malaysia and New Zealand have been annotated to show the occurrence of five linguistic features ('explaining', 'housekeeping', 'humour', 'storytelling' and 'summarising'). I will look at patterns in the distribution of these features across the lectures, and discuss possible reasons why differences occur.

Standards, Standardization, and English Linguistic History

Tim Machan, University of Notre Dame / Fulbright professor, UiO

Thursday 24 April 2014 at 14.15, PAM 489

Grammars and textbooks characteristically treat the history of the standardization of English as not only unswerving progress from the medieval to the modern periods but also a story identical to that of the history of English itself. In fact, the medieval varieties that have been cited as incipient standards poorly justify the model of the “triumph of English.” In this paper I first survey the various suggested medieval standards of English. I then consider their claims to be standards, and, finally, I address the theoretical implications not simply of medieval standards but of our interest in them.

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

Signe Oksefjell Ebeling

Thursday 15th May at 14.15 in PAM 489

Previous studies have shown the productive nature of eye and how it enters into patterns of a more or less non-compositional nature (e.g. Sinclair 1991, Więcławska 2012). This paper adds a contrastive dimension and explores the cross-linguistic phraseology of the English-Norwegian cognates eye and øye on the basis of monolingual, bilingual and multilingual corpora.

References

Sinclair, John. 1991. Shared knowledge. In J.E. Alatis (ed.), Linguistics and Language Pedagogy: The State of the Art. Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1991. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 489-500.
Więcławska, Edyta. 2012. A Contrastive Semantic and Phraseological Analysis of the HEAD-related Lexical Items in Diachronic Perspective. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego.

Author Identification

Michael P. Oakes, RIILP, University of Wolverhampton, England.

Tuesday 16 September 2014, 14.15; Seminarrom 6 PAM

Automatic author identification is a branch of computational stylometry, which is the computer analysis of writing style. It is based on the idea that an author’s style can be described by a unique set of textual features, typically the frequency of use of individual words, but sometimes considering the use of higher level linguistic features. Disputed authorship studies assume that some of these features are outside the author’s conscious control, and thus provide a reliable means of discriminating between individual authors. Many studies have successfully made use of high frequency function words like “the”, “of” and “and”, which tend to have grammatical functions rather than reveal the topic of the text. Their usage is unlikely to be consciously regulated by authors, but varies substantially between authors, texts, and even individual characters in Jane Austen’s novels. Using stylometric techniques, Oakes and Pichler (2013) were able to show that the writing style of the document “Diktat für Schlick” was much more similar to that of Wittgenstein than that of other philosophers of the Vienna Circle.

The perfect in spoken Ghanaian English

Gloria Otchere

Time and place: Oct. 14, 2014 2:15 PM, PAM 489

The talk presents the background and the theoretical and methodological foundations of my PhD project aimed at exploring the underlying linguistic systematicity in the use of the perfect in spoken Ghanaian English. This bigger project aims at exploring the linguistic constraints on the use of the perfect in spoken Ghanaian English, and attempts an explanation of the patterns that emerge by comparing it to the patterns in British English, which is its input variety; American English, which is a ‘virtual’ input variety whose influence is increasingly felt through the many literature, movies, music and religious materials which abound in the country; and the Twi, the major indigenous Ghanaian language spoken in Ghana. The project is based on the assumption that given the highly multilingual context of Ghana, the grammar of Ghanaian English, which can be considered as a contact language in several respects, is likely to be made up of features drawn from the languages which are present in its environment as it develops, and so different tendencies in Ghanaian English can be explained by recourse to the other languages.

Indians or Norwegians: Who’s more sorry? Apology strategies in 2 varieties of English

Lalita Murty (UiO and the Norwegian Study Centre, University of York)

Tuesday 11 November, 14:15, PAM 489

This talk will present the findings of a study comparing the use of apology strategies by business management students in India (an established Outer Circle variety) and Norway (a variety that straddles outer and expanding circles) in a range of business settings. A Discourse Completion Task following Blum-Kulka et al (1989) consisting of a mix of 10 business situations was employed to elicit apologies from 50 students each in India and Norway.

While both groups performed similarly, there are subtle differences between the groups in the use of individual strategies. On the whole, the results of both groups are in line with the findings of main studies in the field, suggesting universality in the use of apology strategies (Blum-Kulka, S., J. House and and G. Kasper (eds.) 1989).

Gazing at the source text in translation - what's going on?

Bergljot Behrens, ILOS

Time and place: Dec. 9, 2014 2:15 PM, PAM 489

Previous studies show that reading for translation differs in important ways from reading for comprehension. This is taken to mean that (pre-)translation is going on during the reading of the source text.

On the basis of temporal measures of gaze at source text segments (English) correlated with linguistic properties of the source and the target texts (Danish, German and Spanish), I discuss a)the possibility that the translator activates alternative syntactic structures in the process of translation, and b) the possibility that particular restructuring operations are more demanding than others from a cognitive perspective.

The study is based on three sub-corpora of the CRITT TPR-DB of translations, and is work in progress.

2013

A corpus-based study of language ideologies in newspaper discourse: the expression of attitudes towards English in Norway

Anne-Line Graedler, Høgskolen i Hedmark.

Thursday 31 January 2013, 14.15; room 489 PAM

Abstract

In this talk I will discuss some central methodological challenges involved in a project with the working title ”A corpus-based study of language ideologies in newspaper discourse: the expression of attitudes towards English in Norway”. While the project is not specifically related to English language research, the methods are partly based on corpus linguistics, as is the case with several other similarly oriented projects (e.g. Baker et al. 2008; Deneire 2012; Freake 2012). At this stage a pilot version of the project exists which has triggered a number of questions related to methodology. Some involve basic issues concerning representativity and reliability in the corpus compilation process, while others implicate more specific, project-related issues concerning the use of corpus linguistic methods to uncover recurrent discursive patterns in the material.

References

Baker, P., C. Gabrielatos, M. Khosravinik, M. Krzyzanowski, T. McEnery & R. Wodak. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society 19(3): 273-306.
Deneire, M. (2012). Images of English in the French press. Conference presentation, English in Europe: Debates and Discourses, U of Sheffield.
Freake, R. (2012). A cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study of language ideologies in Canadian newspapers. Proceedings of the 2011 Corpus Linguistics Conference, Birmingham University.

The Norwegian component of LINDSEI

Susan Nacey and Hege Larsson Aas, Hedmark University College.

Thursday 28 February 2013, 14.15-16.00; room 489 PAM

This talk explores the Norwegian component of LINDSEI, the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (Gilquin et al. 2010), a subcorpus that has been under compilation at Hedmark University College since 2010.

The LINDSEI corpus was created under the direction of the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) in Belgium, which specializes in the collection and use of learner and multilingual corpora. The first edition of LINDSEI contains 554 interviews of learners from 11 different L1 backgrounds (usually 50 interviews per subcorpus). The interviews have been conducted in English, to capture the learners’ ‘interlanguage’, an idiosyncratic dialect that shares characteristics of their L1 and L2 (and sometimes other languages as well) (see Corder 1981: 17, 85).

Plans for a second edition began even before the publication of the first edition, with the ambition of including the audio files, and linking the spoken and transcribed text. Moreover, data from learners with other language backgrounds will be added, thereby increasing the size and linguistic range of the corpus. One of the additional subcorpora in the expanded LINDSEI will comprise interviews of Norwegian speakers of L2 English. The creation of this Norwegian component is nearing completion, as a team of researchers at Hedmark University College has now recorded 50 interviews and almost finished all the transcriptions.

The main aims of this talk are four-fold:
1) To raise awareness among corpus linguists in Norway of the existence of this corpus. The corpus is described in detail, and group members will be allowed a preview of the material, long before its ultimate publication.

2) To address some of the challenges inherent in the production of spoken corpora whose compilation depends upon widespread international collaboration. The main areas discussed in this regard involve issues raised while retracing the footsteps of the first group of LINDSEI researchers through the employment of the already-established guidelines for corpus compilation and transcription. Primary focus is here given to general issues concerning compilation and transcription (e.g. the role/identity of the interviewer), as well as more specific ones relating to the nature of learners’ interlanguage (e.g. ‘standard’ transcriptions of filled pauses).

3) To briefly discuss the research that has already been carried out using this corpus, as well as research that is underway. This includes two smaller studies, one on compensation strategies employed by Norwegian learners (Nacey & Graedler forthcoming) and one on preposition use in spoken English (Nacey & Graedler), as well as a doctoral project concerning highly recurrent word combinations in the spoken text of Norwegian learners (Aas).

4) To solicit ideas from members of the Corpus Linguistics Group for future research using LINDSEI. To this end, the talk will conclude with a brainstorming session involving all participants.

References

Corder, S. P. (1981). Error analysis and interlanguage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gilquin, G., S. De Cock, & S. Granger. (2010). Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI). Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain.
Nacey, S., & A.-L. Graedler. (forthcoming). Communication strategies in a corpus of advanced learner English. In L. Degrand & Sylviane Granger (Eds.), Corpora and Language in Use: Proceedings. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Presses universitaires de Louvain.

Valencies versus argument structure constructions: quantitative corpus studies on the distribution of argument structure patterns of psych-verbs

Stefan Engelberg, Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim

Thursday 21 March 2013, 14.15-16.00, PAM 10

Psych-verbs exhibit a fairly large variation of argument structure patterns, alternating between stimuli and experiencers in subject position, between nominal and sentential realizations of arguments, and between explicit and implicit arguments. Therefore, they lend themselves to an investigation of the quantitative distribution of argument structure patterns that is expected to contribute to the current debate about the adequacy of valency-based versus construction-based approaches to argument structure.

The data presented are based on two types of corpus studies. (i) “Verbprofile Analyses” are based on corpus samples of sentences for each of the psych-verbs investigated; the samples are processed by assigning each sentence to the argument realization pattern it represents. The number of sentences for each argument realization pattern of a verb are counted and subjected to statistical analyses (cluster analysis, association measures); three studies of this types have been carried out so far: German psych-verbs in newspaper texts, German psych-verbs in corpora representing different registers, and German psych-verbs and their Romanian counterparts in newspaper texts. (ii) In “Exhaustive Clause Pattern Analyses” argument structure patterns are embedded into partial clauses in which the argument structure pattern is known to occur frequently. The clause patterns are searched for in the entire corpus and the frequency data statistically analyzed.

The data show that three types of factors determine the quantitative distribution of argument structures: (i) verb-independent linguistic factors, among them stylistic properties of text genre, requirements from information structure, functional dependencies between different argument structure patterns, and cross-linguistic conceptual-semantic properties of verbs; (ii) general properties of the cognitive system, in particular of the memory system, which account for the strong entrenchment of a handful of verbs in each argument structure pattern; (iii) idiosyncratic preferences of verbs or verb classes for particular argument structure patterns.

While the last factor points to the existence of valency-based argument structure representations, there is also evidence for construction-driven behavior. In particular, argument structures of small or medium frequency all show similar frequency distribution patterns with respect to the respective verbs they occur with; this reveals how constructions are entrenched with particular verbs and slowly spread over other parts of the verb lexicon. Thus, the data give rise to a discussion of the interplay of valency and argument structure constructions.

Engagement and the Generic Staging of Medical Research Articles

Daniel Lees Fryer, Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg.

Thursday 25 April 2013, 14:15-16:00, 489 PAM

In this talk, I will present some of the latest findings from my ongoing PhD project. Using Appraisal theory, a framework for modeling evaluative language, I investigate the linguistic means by which writers of medical research articles engage with and position themselves in relation to other voices in the discourse. In the presentation, I will describe the selection and annotation of the corpus of texts I am examining, a collection of highly cited medical research articles from four leading general medical journals. This will be followed by presentation of, and comments on, the use and function of different types (or features) of engagement, their frequencies and selection probabilities, their distributions, and their typical realizations, across the corpus as a whole and across different generic stages of the texts. One of the main aims of the talk, and indeed the project as a whole, is to explore how patterns of engagement vary in relation to the rhetorical purposes of different generic stages of the medical research article. I am interested, in particular, in discussing with the group ideas for how best to measure and describe this relationship.

Verbal and nominal expressions in an English-Norwegian translation perspective

Hilde Hasselgård

CLG, Thursday 5 September 2013, PAM 489

In this presentation I will explore some verbal and nominal expressions in English and Norwegia. The material consists of selected pairs of verbs and nouns in which the noun is derived from the verb and expresses a nominalized process, for example discover/oppdage vs discovery/oppdagelse. I have used the non-fiction part of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. By studying the translation of partly synonymous verbs and nouns in both directions of translation, we get a better picture of verbal and nominal expressions of processes in both languages. Since explicitation is said to be a feature of translation, it was expected that some of the nominalizations would be translated by verbal expressions, but that the opposite would not happen much. This hypothesis was only partly supported. As Norwegian is often claimed to be a verb-preferring language, fewer nominalizations were expected in Norwegian; however the results suggest that the languages are more similar in this respect than has been assumed.

Texture in Learner Language

Sylvi Rørvik

Thursday 3 October, 14.15; room 489 PAM

In this talk I will present some of the findings from my dissertation, entitled Texture in learner language. The main aim of the study was to investigate the extent to which Norwegian advanced learners are able to create texture when writing in English, i.e. their ability to exploit linguistic resources to create coherent texts, and which factors might explain any differences between the Norwegian students’ texts and L1 English texts. Specifically, the study examined choices related to thematic structure, information structure, thematic progression, and the use of explicit links between sentences in the form of connectors. The learner material comes from the Norwegian component of the International Corpus of Learner English (NICLE), and has been compared with English and Norwegian texts written by L1 expert and novice writers.

The results show that the NICLE writers do not use texturing resources in the same manner as native speakers. Two significant differences are overuse of themes containing given information in NICLE and overuse of connectors in themes. Transfer from Norwegian plays a surprisingly insignificant role as explanation for the non-native-like use of texturing resources in NICLE. The NICLE writers are more frequently influenced by developmental factors, either in the form of shared characteristics among novice writers whose L1 is Norwegian or among novice L1 and L2 writers of English.

LALME: The on-line edition of A Linguistic Atlas of Mediaeval English

Michael Benskine

Time: 30 October 2013, 2:15 PM

Available at: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html

Connectors in English and French

Maïté Dupont, Université catholique de Louvain.

Time and place: Nov. 4, 2013 2:15 PM, PAM 489

Languages in the world differ in terms of the types of cohesive devices that they use and favour, but also in the extent to which they need to make discourse relations explicit in text. Very few studies have compared the use of connectors in English and in French. The few studies available have claimed that French is more explicitly cohesive than English. However, these conclusions rest on a weak empirical basis, and as a result are currently merely hypothetical. The primary aim of my Masters thesis was to test these claims against a large comparable corpus of editorials, focusing on the meaning relation of contrast. For that purpose, four types of explicit discourse-structuring devices were taken into account: adverbial connectors, conjunctions of coordination, conjunctions of subordination and cohesive lexical bundles. In addition to this central quantitative aim, the study includes more qualitative comparisons. A first qualitative analysis consisted in comparing connector placement patterns in English and in French. The last part of the study draws a broad semantic profile of the ten most frequent English and French connectors of contrast in the corpus, in an attempt to establish which connectors may convey which subtypes of contrast. The presentation of my thesis will be followed by a brief presentation of my PhD project, which will be both a continuation and an extension of my Master’s dissertation.

‘In my opinion’: Discourse-organising nouns in learner English

Marie Tåqvist, Karlstad University

Time and place: Nov. 21, 2013 2:15 PM, PAM 489

This study investigates the use of discourse-organising nouns (DONs) in Swedish advanced students’ academic writing, and compares it with the use of DONs in advanced L1 students’ academic writing and in expert academic writing. DONs are semantically unspecific nouns (e.g., argument, fact, problem, and thing) often used as cohesive devices in academic writing, or as ‘pegs’ for semantic content expressed elsewhere in the linguistic context (e.g., in my opinion, the fact that, this problem, another important argument is that). A quantitative analysis of 93 DONs in the three corpora found that the L2 student writers used the most tokens overall, especially a few very high-frequency DONs, but that they used the fewest types. They relied especially on a few semantically flexible high-frequency nouns such as thing and fact to a higher degree than the other two writer groups. A qualitative analysis of thing, fact, and opinion found that the L2 student writers used these nouns differently from how they were used in the expert corpus and, to a lesser extent, in the L1 student corpus, with the effect of creating discourse that may arguably be considered to be more vague and subjective.

2012

Two for the price of one: on the history of the English progressive

Johan Elsness, ILOS

Time and place: Feb. 9, 2012 2:15 PM, PAM 489

Old English had a much simpler system of verb forms than the present-day language. The vast majority of verb forms were in either the simple present or the simple past form. Over the centuries various periphrastic verbal constructions have emerged and become numerous: the perfect, the passive and the progressive. In this talk the focus will be on the progressive (BE + -ing) and the status of this verb form especially in early Modern English. It is commonly assumed that the modern English progressive had a dual origin in Old English: It seems to have arisen as a blend between an Old English construction which also consisted of a BE verb followed by a present participle, then ending in –ende (... þæt scip wæs ealne weg yrnende under segle, '... that ship was all the way running under sail'), and an Old English construction with BE followed by a preposition, often on, plus the gerund (... ʒyrstandæʒ ic wæs on huntunʒe, ‘… yesterday I was (on) hunting’). Gradually the preposition from the latter construction was reduced (as in a-hunting) and then lost altogether, while the participial ending changed from –ende to –ing, leading to a merger of the two constructions. Various counts suggest that the frequency of the progressive has multiplied several times since the beginning of the Modern English period and that it is still on the increase today. This presentation will also take up the semantic development of the English progressive, and address the apparent paradox that at the same time as this verb form underwent a huge increase in frequency, its semantic range seems to have narrowed: The present-day construction expresses a pretty clear imperfective meaning, while in earlier stages of the language it could be used much more freely to refer even to events reported as perfective, sometimes to events seen as foregrounded and appearing in a sequence of events; it could also express a clearly passive meaning without being formally marked for the passive.

Initial adjuncts in the history of English (and initial position in the history of French)

Kristin Bech, ILOS

Time and place: Apr. 26, 2012 2:15 PM, PAM 12

According to Lenker (2010), the system of connectives (conjuncts) is restructured in the history of English, starting in the Middle English (ME) period, and co-occurring with the typological change English underwent from verb-second (V2) to SV syntax.

Los (2009, to appear) suggests that in the V2 language Old English (OE), the first position of the clause was primarily a position for textual cohesion, similar to the V2 languages Modern German and Modern Dutch, whereas the presubject position in English became marked after the loss of V2, and is in Present-day English (PdE) to a greater extent used for text organization than discourse linking (cohesion).

Hasselgård (2010) comments that initial adjuncts often have a scene-setting function in PdE. In an earlier study, Hasselgård (2004) compares PdE to the V2 language Norwegian and finds that Norwegian has a higher frequency of non-subjects, and also a higher frequency of adjuncts, in initial position. The anaphoricity of the adjuncts is not explicitly discussed, but we may assume that Norwegian uses initial position for text cohesion to a greater extent than English does, although Norwegian is probably less versatile than German in this respect.

In sum, there is clear evidence that as English underwent its typological change, the function of the initial position also changed, and that English is now different from the other Germanic languages in the use of initial position. The present paper focuses on adverbial adjuncts, more specifically prepositional phrases, of which PP adjuncts of time and place are the most frequent. I look at how initial adjuncts link up with the preceding context in OE, and what happens to this type of clause linkage in the course of the ME period. I will also make a few comments on the initial position in another language that developed from V2 to SV, namely French, since the ISWOC project aims to study languages from a contrastive point of view.

References

Hasselgård, Hilde. 2004. Thematic choice in English and Norwegian. In Functions of Language 11.2, 187-212.
Hasselgård, Hilde. 2010. Adjunct adverbials in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lenker, Ursula. 2010. Argument and rhetoric. Adverbial connectors in the history of English. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Los, Bettelou. 2009. The consequences of the loss of verb-second in English. Information structure and syntax in interaction. In English Language and Linguistics 13.1, 97-125.
Los, Bettelou. To appear. The loss of verb-second and the switch from bounded to unbounded systems. In Information structure and syntactic change in the history of English, ed. by A. Meurmans-Solin, M.J. Lopez-Couso & B. Los. Oxford University Press.

An English-Norwegian comparison of adjunct adverbials

Hilde Hasselgård (ILOS)

Time and place: May 24, 2012 2:15 PM, PAM 489

This paper presents a contrastive exploration of adjunct adverbials* in English and Norwegian. It uses the system for classification and analysis of adverbials developed in my book Adjunct Adverbials in English (Cambridge University Press 2010). The contrastive study focuses on two text types of English and Norwegian, namely fiction and news reportage. For the English part, the ICE-GB corpus is used; i.e. the analysis of English is taken directly from the 2010 book. The Norwegian part consists of a collection of newspaper articles (taken from online editions of a number of papers) and some fictional texts. The original study of English identified a number of differences between text types as to their use of adverbial adjuncts, concerning the overall frequency of adjuncts in running text, the frequency distribution of semantic subtypes of adjuncts and the use of adverbial positions. Furthermore, the text types also differed somewhat as to the discourse functions of adjuncts. The aim of the investigation is thus two-fold: to compare the use of adverbial adjuncts in English and Norwegian (with regard to the frequency of syntactic and semantic types, adverbial placement and discourse functions) and to investigate whether the same pattern of text type variation can be seen in the Norwegian corpus. A subsidiary objective is to try out the framework for analysing English adverbials on Norwegian text.

*'adjunct' is defined approximately according to the classification system in Quirk et al (1985)

Patterns in contrast

Jarle Ebeling & Signe Oksefjell Ebeling

Wednesday 12 September, 14.15; room 489 PAM

Abstract

In this talk we will outline a method we have applied in the analysis of patterns in contrast. The method involves using corpus-linguistic approaches anchored in previous contrastive and phraseological work. The contrastive approach is inspired by scholars who advocate translations and cross-linguistic correspondences as tertium comparationis (e.g. James 1980, Altenberg 1999, Johansson 1998, 2007).

Chesterman's (1998, 2007) methodology and his concept of perceived similarity are also sources of inspiration. The phraseological approach which our method relies on is the neo-Firthian one, where meaning, to a greater extent than is often believed, is said to reside in multi-word units rather than single words. These units, or patterns, and Sinclair's (1996, 1998) extended-unit-of-meaning model are therefore central to our study. To illustrate the method a short case study of the pattern back and forth will be presented.

References

Altenberg, Bengt. 1999. Adverbial connectors in English and Swedish: Semantic and lexical correspondences. In H. Hasselgård & S. Oksefjell (eds.). Out of Corpora: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson. Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi. 249-268.
Chesterman, Andrew. 1998. Contrastive Functional Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chesterman, Andrew. 2007. Similarity analysis and the translation profile. In W. Vandeweghe, S. Vandepitte and M. van de Velde (eds.). The Study of Language and Translation. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 21. 53-66.
James, Carl. 1980. Contrastive Analysis. London/ New York: Longman.
Johansson, Stig. 1998. On the role of corpora in cross-linguistic research. In S. Johansson & S. Oksefjell (eds.). Corpora and Cross-linguistic Research: Theory, Method, and Case Studies. Amsterdam/ Atlanta: Rodopi. 3-24.
Johansson, Stig. 2007. Seeing Through Multilingual Corpora: On the Use of Corpora in Contrastive Studies. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Sinclair, John. 1996. The search for units of meaning. Textus IX. 75-106.
Sinclair, John. 1998. The lexical item. In E. Weigand. (ed.). Contrastive Lexical Semantics. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 1-24.

Yes, we can! (or no, we can’t?): SFL, CL and patterns of conjunction

Geoff Thompson, University of Liverpool, UK

Time and place: Oct. 24, 2012 2:15 PM, PAM 454

It is widely recognised that there is a tension in register analysis between, on the one hand, the desirability of identifying patterns of linguistic choices in as large a corpus as possible and, on the other, the need to include choices which the computer software available is not yet sophisticated enough to recognise automatically (see e.g. Matthiessen 2006).

The study that I am engaged in points up this tension particularly sharply. My aim is to explore differences and similarities in the deployment of the resources of conjunction in different registers. The focus is on conjunctive relations between clauses (irrespective of whether or not the clauses form part of the same clause complex – cf. Martin 1992: 163-5). These relations may be signalled by closed-class items (conjunctions and conjuncts), but there are many less easily enumerable signals, including, but not restricted to, Winter’s (1977) Vocabulary 3; and, in addition, the relation may not be explicitly signalled.

What I will do in this presentation is, first, briefly outline the model of conjunction with which I am working. I then wish to address an issue that I see as increasingly urgent if corpus linguistics is to continue setting the research agenda as it has done in the past decades: that is, how far automatic recognition of fundamental features of discourse can be pushed, particularly in the direction of functional realizations. I will discuss analytical difficulties relating to the classification of the kinds of relationships found, and consider the implications of the SFL tenet that all meaning differences are construed by differences in wording (and vice-versa). In particular, I will explore the possibility of establishing reliable, automatisable tests for discriminating between instances of conjunctive relationships which are close in some way (such as where the same closed-class conjunctive signal realises different relationships). The possibilities and limitations of automatic analysis will be illustrated with examples from my data, focusing on the different patterns of use of because.

References

Martin, J. R. 1992. English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M. 2006. Frequency profiles of some basic grammatical systems: an interim report. In Geoff Thompson and Susan Hunston (eds.) System and Corpus: Exploring Connections, 103-142. London: Equinox.
Winter, Eugene. O. 1977. A clause-relational approach to English texts: A study of some predictive lexical items in written discourse. Instructional Science 6: 1-92.

Corpus Linguistics and Beyond

Wolfgang Teubert, University of Birmingham.

Time and place: Nov. 21, 2012 2:15 PM, PAM 454

Corpus linguistics is often seen as a field of applied linguistics, and it has always kept its distance to language theory. To the extent there has been a discussion of its principles, they have been centred around the issues ‘corpus-based vs. corpus-driven’ and ‘top-down vs. bottom up.’ Some see corpus linguistics as bunch of tools, others as a more or less scientific methodology and very few as a language theory in its own right.

The aim of corpus linguistics has been to come up with reliable empirical data concerning language as a (standardised) system, yielding generalisations useful for language teaching and dictionary compilation. This aim, however, is in conflict with the principle that the meaning of units of meaning (whatever they may be) is largely determined by the context in which it is embedded, a context that can hardly be reduced to a common denominator. Meaning is only found in discourse. It is not part of a language system.

Discourse has, of necessity, a diachronic dimension. What is said is often a reaction to what has been said before and cannot be understood without following its intertextual links. The meaning of a unit of meaning (type) is the entirety of what has been said about it. It is constructed and continually (re-)negotiated in discourse. Therefore the meaning of a unit of meaning (token) is the difference between its current context and the entirety of contexts in which it has been previously used.

There is no ‘scientific’ methodology to extract meaning without making arbitrary decisions. It is up to the interpretive community (i.e. the discourse community) to review and make sense of the data extracted from discourse. A theory of corpus linguistics finds its place not in a science of language, but in discourse studies as part of the humanities.

Do the plural suffixes -gulo, -guli, -ra and -der belong to the classifier system of modern Bangla?

Hildegunn Dirdal

Wednesday 12 December, 14.15; room 489 PAM

Bangla (or Bengali) has a so-called numeral-classifier system, which means that certain morphemes are typically attached to a numeral or other quantifier in order to classify the referent of the noun phrase in which they occur. This is exemplified in (1).

(1) car-jon lok tin-Ta na car-Ta din

four CLA(human) people three-CLA(default) or four-CLA day

‘four people’ ‘three or four days’

That the morphemes -jon and -Ta in the examples above belong among the classifiers is uncontroversial. The same holds for several other morphemes. However, when it comes to the plural suffixes -gulo, -guli, -ra and -der, the literature shows different opinions. Some treat these as a different type of morphemes; others include -gulo and -guli among the classifiers, but exclude -ra and -der; and when -ra and -der are included, there is no proper account of the reasons for doing so. In my talk, I will present data from the EMILLE corpus showing to what extent the plural suffixes are similar to the established classifiers when it comes to classification of noun phrase referents, syntactic position in the noun phrase, participation in definiteness marking and status as phrasal rather than inflectional suffixes.

The EMILLE Corpus was constructed in cooperation between the EMILLE project (Enabling Minority Language Engineering) at Lancaster University and the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore, India. It is distributed by the European Language Resources Association. The corpus contains fourteen monolingual corpora with data from different South-Asian languages. It also contains a parallel corpus with English texts and their translations into Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. I have used the spoken language part of the Bangla corpus.

2011

Texture in Learner Language

Sylvi Rørvik

Tuesday 1 February 2011

Do Norwegian students of English structure their texts in the same way that native speakers of English do?

In this talk I will present my Ph.D. project "Texture in learner language", which is a study of thematic progression and cohesion in texts produced by Norwegian advanced learners of English. The presentation will include an overview of the analytical framework (based on systemic-functional grammar) and the methods and material I use. I will also present some results from a pilot study.

The following questions form the starting point for the investigation:

How native-like is the English produced by Norwegian advanced learners in terms of texture, i.e. as regards thematic structure and the use of conjunction as a cohesive device?
Which factors might explain differences found between English produced by Norwegian advanced learners and English produced by native speakers?

The Development of OE ē and ēo in Middle English: spelling evidence

Gjertud F. Stenbrenden

Tuesday 1 March, 14.15 pm; room 489 PAM

In my recently finished doctoral dissertation, I examine Middle English (ME) spelling evidence for the ‘Great Vowel Shift’ as well as for earlier long-vowel changes in late Old English (OE) and early ME. The evidence has been abstracted from three ME corpora which collectively cover the period c. 1150-1500; the corpora have made use of texts in local language; the language of each text has, moreover, been precisely localised. In this talk, the ME developments of OE ē and ēo are discussed, with a view to illustrating (a) the types of long-vowel changes investigated, (b) the types of evidence exploited, (c) the kinds of problems which attend the interpretation of orthographical material in terms of phonetic correspondences, (d) the dating and chronology of the long-vowel changes in question, and (e) the dialects which stand out as loci of change.

Using corpus data for a semantic analysis of Russian converbs

Maria Filiouchkina Krave

Tuesday 5 April, 14.15 pm; room 489 PAM

In this talk, I want to present some highlights from my doctoral thesis. The study has focused on the interpretation of Russian converb constructions – nonfinite verb forms used for adverbial subordination (e.g. Čut’ podumav, on otvetil... ‘Having thought a little, he replied...’). It is argued that two basic temporal meanings are expressed by Russian converbs – the relative past (anteriority) of perfective converbs and the relative present (simultaneity) of imperfective converbs. Using a formal semantic framework, I show how the morphological features of converbs contribute to the temporal interpretation of converb sentences. The empirical part of the analysis can be divided into three parts, based on the type of data analysed:

(i) Russian fiction texts (source texts) from the RuN corpus. The data show that the position of the converb clause with respect to the matrix clause as well as presence of certain temporal (frame) adverbials affect the temporal interpretation of such sentences, e.g. resulting in a posteriority reading of perfective converbs.

(ii) Russian source texts and their English and Norwegian correspondences in the RuN corpus. This contrastive analysis shows which patterns correspond to converbs in the target data. The following factors are shown to play an important role in the interpretation: e.g. the aspectual form of the converb, lexical aspect of the converb construction (and the matrix verb), logical relations between different kinds of events, discourse relations.

(iii) Written film renarrations produced by advanced Norwegian learners of Russian vs. native speakers of Russian and Norwegian. This small-scale study examines which features of converbs are particularly challenging for learners of Russian.

Comparing linguistic metaphors is L1 and L2 English

Susan Nacey

Time and place: May 3, 2011 2:15 PM, PAM489

I have recently defended my doctoral dissertation, entitled Comparing linguistic metaphors is L1 and L2 English. This investigation had two main aims:

1) to compare the extent and characteristics of the metaphorical expressions written by advanced Norwegian speakers of English with those produced by British A-level students who are native speakers of English, and
2) to trial and evaluate the newly-developed Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) as a tool for identifying linguistic metaphors in the written production of novice writers.

In this talk I will first present a summary of my dissertation, defining the object of study (linguistic metaphor) and then providing details on both the data (from the NICLE and LOCNESS corpora) and the general results concerning Norwegian learner language.

The bulk of my discussion, however, will focus on my second research aim about the method used for metaphor identification. I will explain MIP in some depth, exemplifying the procedure with material found in my data. Advantages and disadvantages of the procedure, especially as regards learner language, will also be discussed. Given time and interest, we may also try out the procedure on the two opening sentences from the very first NICLE text I analyzed, thus offering a taste of the various considerations at stake when deciding upon metaphoricity.

The VESPA corpus: status report and first explorations

Signe Oksefjell Ebeling & Hilde Hasselgård

Thursday 8 September, 14.15-16

Room 489, PAM

For some time we have been collecting student texts written by students in our linguistics classes for a corpus of academic student writing. The texts have been annotated and can now be used as a corpus. We will give you a report on the VESPA project and the work done so far. In the second part of our talk we will show the first attempts at using the corpus in conjunction with its French sister corpus as well as the Norwegian and French components of the ICLE corpus. This investigation concerns “writer/reader visibility in learner writing across genres”. It has been carried out in close collaboration with Magali Paquot at Louvain-la-Neuve and will be presented at the forthcoming conference “Learner Corpus Research 2011”.

In search of the lost tense/time

Diana Santos

Corpus Linguistics Group, PAM 489, 14:15-16:00 6 October 2011

Abstract

In the presentation, which will be rather future-oriented, I will try to present in a coherent way my intentions for the near future, and which are to try to merge - previous corpus-based work on tense and aspect in Portuguese (and English) - present corpus-driven work on tense and aspect in Portuguese into a future corpus-based descriptive grammar of Portuguese

While doing this, I will

1) share with you some existential problems on the role of statistical methods in corpus linguistics

2) present the current corpus "infrastructure" for Portuguese corpus studies at ILOS

3) present my related intentions for related research (and get critical return form the audience) namely with a view to improved pedagogical "tiltak".

A corpus-driven approach to discourse markers in spoken data

Gisle Andersen, NHH

Thursday 10 November 2011, 14.15-16, Room 489, PAM

The paper asks the question: can bottom-up data-driven approaches be useful for the study of discourse markers based on corpora? Corpus-based studies of discourse markers have almost exclusively applied the method of one-to-one searching (Walsh et al. 2008), where specific linguistic forms are searched for in the corpus, based on the researcher's a priori knowledge of their existence and relevance, gaining relevant search hits as a basis for study. I wish to explore the idea that the use of discourse markers may also be observed via bottom-up approaches, such as investigating systematic differences between datasets in terms of their collocational patterns, relative frequencies, lexical inventory etc. Discourse markers are often the result of innovative language use and processes of grammaticalisation. Further, many discourse markers are phrasal units. It is assumed that such emergent processes and the occurrence of new, phrasal discourse markers may be revealed via bottom-up approaches to the data. The discussion points will be illustrated with reference to findings based on two corpora of spoken English.

Swimming against the tide of the Great Complement Shift

Thomas Egan, HiHm

Thursday 1 December 2011, 14.15-16, Room 489, PAM

Studies of complementation in Late Modern English, such as Fanego (1996, 1997), Vosberg (2003) and Egan (2008) have demonstrated that, while there was a degree of flexibility in the use of gerunds and infinitives (and indeed finite clauses) in the period in question, it also witnessed a steady general increase in the use of the gerund. This is one of several developments in complementation patterns that have come to be known as Great Complement Shift, a term first used in print by Rohdenburg (2006). In this presentation I trace the complementation patterns over the last three centuries of two verbs, prefer and continue, that occurred with the gerund before they came to be used with the infinitive.

From the time it first appeared in the language until the seventeenth century, prefer occurred primarily with nominal complements. In the seventeenth century it began to be used occasionally with verbal complements, at first mostly with the gerund. The to-infinitive form of complement only became common in the nineteenth century. The data in the Corpus of Late Modern English texts (see De Smet 2005) show that in the period 1780 – 1850 the gerund outnumbered the infinitive after prefer by a margin of over ten to one. The exact opposite situation pertains in Present-day English, as is evidenced by data in such corpora as FLOB, FROWN and the BNC. Having first traced the development of prefer in Middle English and Early Modern English, I will examine the spread of the to-infinitive form of the complement at the expense of the gerund in Late Modern English and propose an explanation for this development.

The second verb I will look at is continue. In Present-day English the construction with the to-infinitive outnumbers that with the gerund by some ten to one. Thus, a random sample of 1,000 tokens of continue in the BNC yields 437 tokens of the former construction and 40 of the latter. The ratio between the two constructions was very similar (in written texts) in the eighteenth century, with 151 tokens of the to-infinitive construction in the first sub-corpus (1710-1780) of CLMET as opposed to 16 of the construction with the gerund. On the face of this evidence it would appear that we are faced with two constructions that have remained relatively stable for the part three hundred years. This picture may, however, be misleading. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a considerable increase in the incidence of the construction with the gerund compared to that with the to-infinitive in the texts in CLMET (65 tokens compared to 213 in CLMET 1780-1850). This was followed by a sharp decrease in the second half of the century. I examine the apparent temporary advance and subsequent retreat of the continue –ing construction in the nineteenth century and compare developments in British English with those in American English, as documented in the Corpus of Historical American English.

References

De Smet, Hendrik. (2005). A Corpus of Late Modern English Texts. ICAME Journal, 29-82.

Egan, T. (2008). ‘Emotion verbs with to-infinitive complements: from specific to general predication’, in M. Gotti, M. Dossena, and R. Dury (eds.), Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 14), Bergamo, 21-25 August 2006. Volume I: Syntax and Morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 223-240

Fanego, T. (1996). ‘On the Historical Development of English Retrospective Verbs’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 97: 71-79.

Fanego, T. (1997). ‘On patterns of complementation with verbs of effort’, English Studies, 78 (1): 60-67.

Rohdenburg, G. (2006). The Role of Functional Constraints in the Evolution of the English Complementation System. In C. Dalton-Puffer, D. Kastovsky, N. Ritt & H. Schendl (eds.), Syntax, Style and Grammatical Norms: English from 1500-2000. Bern: Peter Lang. 143-166.

Vosberg, U. (2003). ‘The role of extractions and horror aequi in the evolution of -ing-complements in Modern English’, in G. Rohdenburg and B. Mondorf (eds.), Determinants of Gammatical Variation in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 305-327.

2010

Daniel Lees Fryer: Intersubjective positioning in biomedical reserach discourse

8 Dec 2010, 14.15, PAM 489

According to Bakhtin, all utterances are dialogic. This implies that all utterances are in some way stanced or attitudinal, since a speaker/writer is influenced by, refers to, and responds to what has been said/written before, and simultaneously anticipates the responses of the putative listener/reader. In my Ph.D. project, I use the theoretical frameworks of systemic-functional linguistics and appraisal, as well as research on rhetoric and academic literacy, to examine how this dialogism manifests itself in medical research discourse and how medical researchers themselves apply and interpret such dialogic resources in order to engage with the heteroglossia of previous research and the anticipated responses of the reader.

An integral part of the project involves the construction and annotation of a corpus of medical research articles. In this presentation, I will describe how data for the corpus has been collected and how this data has been/will be annotated and analyzed for its dialogic properties. I will also present some of the challenges I have encountered so far, including potential constraints of the appraisal framework and its application to a corpus of multimodal texts.

Jarle Ebeling: The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

2. Nov. 2010, 14.15, PAM 489

Between 2003 and 2007 I was fortunate to be able to work on the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature project in Oxford. One of the aims of the project was to meet the need for a coherently and systematically published, universally available textual corpus of Sumerian literature. The literature written in Sumerian is arguably the oldest poetry that can be read, dating from approximately 2500 BCE onwards. It includes narrative poetry, praise poetry, hymns, laments, prayers, songs, fables, didactic poems, debate poems and proverbs. The majority of this material has been reconstructed during the past sixty years from thousands of often fragmentary clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform writing.

In this talk I will present some of the challenges of putting together a coherent corpus from fragmentary clay tablets dating back 4000 years, and also show the web interface developed to explore the corpus.

Kristin Bech: The ISWOC Project and Corpus

5. okt. 2010 14:15, PAM 489

In this talk I will present the ISWOC project (Information structure and word order change in Germanic and Romance languages) and the ISWOC corpus. The project deals with word order change in English, Norwegian/Norse, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese. All these languages were verb-second at some stage in their history, but they have developed in different directions, and we think that information structure requirements have something to do with it. The ISWOC corpus is (will be...) constructed and annotated in basically the same way as the PROIEL corpus (Pragmatic resources in Old Indo-European languages), and in the talk I will show you how the corpus is annotated and talk about some of the problems we have encountered so far. If there is time, I will also present parts of the paper I recently gave at the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, which deals with the translation of a gospel text from Latin into Old English.

Johan Elsness: Language and Culture

7. sep. 2010 14:15, PAM 489

In an article published in the ICAME Journal in 1992 Geoffrey Leech and Roger Fallon summed up their cultural comparison of the US and Britain, based on the Brown and LOB corpora from 1961, as follows:

Wrapping up the whole analysis ... in one wild generalization, we may propose a picture of United States culture in 1961 - masculine to the point of machismo, militaristic, dynamic and actuated by high ideals, driven by technology, activity and enterprise - contrasting with one of British culture as more given to temporizing and talking, to benefitting from wealth rather than creating it, and to family and emotional life, less actuated by matters of substance than by considerations of outward status.

In this talk I shall present some results from a wider comparison, taking in the two Freiburg updates of Brown and LOB from 1991/2, and also the BNC (British National Corpus) and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), which both have the advantage of including spoken as well as written material. Some of the questions which will be asked – and, hopefully, answered – are: Is the US still more macho? Did the cultural gap, as reflected by language usage, narrow as we all became citizens of the global village? How does the distinction between speech and writing fit into this picture? In an attempt to place things in a more global perspective, results from the Australian Corpus of English and the Wellington Corpus of Written New Zealand English will also be brought into the comparison.

Berit Løken: A contrastive interlanguage analysis of expressions of epistemic stance

28 April 2010, 14.15-16, møterom 489 P.A Munchs hus

Several studies suggest that Scandinavian advanced learners of English tend to choose informal and subjective expressions of stance. The present study compares the use of various expressions of stance in texts by learners with different L1 backgrounds (Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Russian, Spanish, French, Dutch and German). The study aims to suggest answers to the following questions:

Do Scandinavian learners differ from other groups in their choice of subjective and informal expressions? Do the student groups differ in their overall use of stance markers? Do the student groups express high-value and low-value probability to the same extent? Are any idiosyncracies results of L1 transfer?

Special attention will be paid to Norwegian students' use of adverbs to express low-value probability.

Hilde Hasselgård: Adjunct Adverbials in English

24 March 2010, 14.15-16, møterom 1132, Niels Treschows hus

Following the recent publication of Adjunct Adverbials in English, I will offer some highlights from the book. These will concern the classification of adjunct adverbials, the discourse functions of adjuncts and how these correlate with placement, and some text type differences in adverbial usage. The publisher's catalogue gives a preview of the book.

Hilde Hasselgård: In fact: perspectives from parallel and learner corpora

24 February 2010, 14.15-16, møterom 1132, Niels Treschows hus

In my presentation I will draw on a contrastive study of in fact and its Norwegian cognate faktisk with an emphasis on their role in the textual metafunction. The aim of that study was to uncover any correlation between the placement of in fact / faktisk and their meanings and discourse functions, and what data from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus can reveal about the similarities and differences between the two discourse markers as regards these variables. The contrastive findings will be correlated with data on in fact (and other expressions with fact) from an ongoing study using the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), with special reference to its Norwegian subcorpus. (The contrastive study was recently published - the reference is here.)

Post-seminar as per usual.

Kay Wikberg: Metaphor, simile and corpus studies

27 January 2010, 14.15-16, møterom 489, P.A. Munchs hus

This will be followed by a post-seminar in our usual place - the Dubliner.

2009

Stig Johansson: Modals and semi-modals of obligation and necessity in recent American English: Some aspects of developments from 1990 until the present day

28 October 2009, 14.15-16, møterom 489, P.A. Munchs hus

In the last few years there has been a great deal of corpus-based research on recent developments in the English modals (including Leech 2003, Smith 2003, Leech 2004, Leech and Smith 2005, Mair 2006, Millar 2009, and Leech et al. in press). It has been reported that there is a tendency towards a decrease in the use of the modals and a rise in the frequency of the semi-modals.

In my talk I will focus on four expressions of strong obligation: the modal must and the semi-modals HAVE to, HAVE got to, and NEED to. A study of these semantically related forms is natural from a monolingual point of view and also makes sense from a cross-linguistic perspective.

The primary material is drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) developed by Mark Davies, Brigham Young University, covering the period from 1990 up to the present. This is a very large corpus, containing 385 million words, about 20 million words from each year (Davies 2009). Apart from its size, it has the great advantages that it contains approximately equal proportions of five genres (Spoken, Fiction, Magazine, News, and Academic) and that it covers a more recent period than the corpora examined in most other studies of recent change in English.

In conclusion, I will discuss some problems relating to corpus-based studies of changes in the English verb phrase.

Signe Oksefjell Ebeling: Interpersonal themes and author stance in student writing

30 September 2009, 14.15-16, møterom 489, P.A. Munchs hus

The group will have its first meeting this term. Signe Oksefjell Ebeling will talk about Interpersonal themes and author stance in student writing, based on an investigation of the BAWE corpus (British Academic Written English Corpus).

Possibly, technology and equipment willing, she will also present Sketch Engine - a tool for corpus research. We will also discuss dates and content for further meetings of the group.

2007-2008

The group continued to meet, but the meetings are not documented on this website.

Published Aug. 17, 2022 2:16 PM - Last modified Nov. 15, 2023 11:22 AM