Norwegian version of this page

English Language and Corpus Linguistics Research

The English Language and Corpus Linguistics Research (ELC) Group provides a forum for the discussion of topics related to corpus linguistics, particularly within English language research.

Image of word cloud showing terms central for the group, such as English, language, linguistics, corpora, contrastive

About the forum

The forum for English Language and Corpus Linguistics Research has members from the University of Oslo as well as other institutions. Meetings are held approximately once a month. The core members based at the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) are involved in various activities, including externally funded projects; please visit their individual profiles for details.

The group meets in PAM 6 on selected Tuesday afternoons at 16:15 (to about 17:30). Watch this space for abstracts for upcoming talks.

Activities autumn 2023

6 September: Kristin Bech

A linguistic innovator in the 10th century

Kristin Bech, ILOS, University of Oslo

In this talk I will present and discuss some results of an investigation into the Old English quantifier fela 'much, many' (cf. German viel). Fela could either take a genitive complement noun (phrase), as in (1), or the noun could be the head, as in Present-day English (2):

(1)
fela manna
many man.GEN.PL
'many men'

(2)
fela men
many man.NOM/ACC.PL
'many men'

When I first started looking into this, I thought a change was going on from (1) to (2) between early and late Old English, but it turned out that (2) was restricted to the works of Ælfric, and to the Peterborough Chronicle. In these texts, there is variation between (1) and (2), whereas the rest of the Old English texts consistently use (1). Ælfric was the most prolific writer of (late) Old English, and the Peterborough Chronicle is the only part of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle that was continued after the Norman invasion of 1066. My next, revised questions were therefore: What was going on in Ælfric's grammar? Random variation or not? Are there similarities between Ælfric and the chronicle? Can this tell us anything about language change, both in individuals and in general? I will answer, or attempt to answer, these questions in the talk. You don’t have to have previous knowledge of Old English to attend this talk (I will explain and exemplify), but you need a basic understanding of the concept of case ('kasus').

27 September: Sara Barosen Liverød

Video games, second language acquisition, and self-efficacy

Sara Barosen Liverød, Department of Languages and Literature Studies, University of South-Eastern Norway

Video games are becoming more and more visible in society and are seen differently than they were 20 years ago. Today, between 85 and 95% of boys aged 9-18 play video games on the regular (Medietilsynet, 2022); and LK20 includes video games as a cultural form of expression that students should encounter in the English course in both Vg1 vocational and general studies. Playing video games can provide many benefits when it comes to language acquisition. You can practice your writing skills while chatting; you can use your oral skills to communicate with your teammates; or you can use your reading skills when figuring out what the goal of the next quest is. My research found that those who play video games have higher self-efficacy when it comes to L2 use both inside and outside of the classroom (Liverød, 2022), which in turn, according to research, may have many positive effects on language acquisition.

In my talk, which will be two-fold, I will consider the didactic implications of video games in second language acquisition in the English language classroom in Norway and outside of it based on LK20 and current research. I will begin with a brief introduction to video games and second language acquisition where the focus will be on extramural English, language acquisition and use, and how this could be relevant within the classroom. Following this will be a presentation of my research on gamers’ self-efficacy in L2 use while gaming and in the classroom. I will present the methodology and main findings. My main argument throughout this talk is that the use of video games can be a very useful tool to 1) learn a language, and 2) get “outlier” students through school.

Sources:

Medietilsynet. (10 November 2022). "Spillfrelste tenåringsgutter og jenter som faller fra: slik gamer barn og unge." https://www.medietilsynet.no/globalassets/publikasjoner/barn-og-medier-undersokelser/2022/221109_gamingreport.pdf

Liverød, S. B. (2022). "Gamers’ self-efficacy when using English in school and when gaming." In: M. Dypedahl (ed.), Moving English language teaching forward, pp. 195–217). Cappelen Damm Akademisk. https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.166.ch9 License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

18 October: Nele Põldvere, Silje Susanne Alvestad, and Elizaveta Kibisova

Stance, fake news and corpora: A contrastive study of English, Norwegian and Russian

Nele Põldvere, Elizaveta Kibisova and Silje Susanne Alvestad (University of Oslo)

In this work-in-progress presentation, we outline the main aims and steps of implementation of a corpus-based analysis of stance in fake news in English, Norwegian and Russian. In our previous study, we found significant differences in Appraisal expressions between fake and genuine news in English (Trnavac & Põldvere, 2023), but it is unclear how these differences are reflected across languages and cultures. Based on Biber’s (2006) stance framework, we set out to compare and contrast the use and distribution of a wide range of lexico-grammatical features of stance across English in the US, Norwegian in Norway and Russian in Russia. To the best of our knowledge, the framework has not been applied to fake news research before, nor are we aware of any extensions of the framework to Norwegian and Russian to facilitate cross-linguistic comparisons. The data are from three corpora of fake and genuine news, collected from fact-checking websites covering news in the respective languages. In this presentation, we focus on and seek feedback on the first steps of the analysis: (i) the development of the stance frameworks in all three languages and (ii) the design and compilation of comparable corpora in terms of size and genre. We also present the outputs of preliminary semi-automatic searches of the stance expressions in the corpora, which give interesting first insights into how stance-taking works in fake news in English, Norwegian and Russian.

References:

Biber, D. (2006). Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5, 97–116.

Trnavac, R., & Põldvere, N. (2023). Investigating Appraisal and the language of evaluation in fake news corpora [Manuscript under review].

22 November: Sylvi Rørvik

Syntactic complexity in learner language

Sylvi Rørvik, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

In this talk I will report on one completed and two ongoing phases of an exploratory study of syntactic complexity in Norwegian learner English. The completed phase (Rørvik 2022) concerns an investigation of noun-phrase complexity in material from the TRAWL corpus (Dirdal et al 2022), which showed that Norwegian pupils in Years 8-10 exhibit little evidence of increased phrasal sophistication across the three years of lower-secondary school (measured according to the framework set out in Biber et al (2011)).

Phase 2 comprises a follow-up of this study, using the same framework to examine the development in noun-phrase complexity in Years 10, 11 (material from TRAWL) and at university level (material from the Norwegian component of the International Corpus of Learner English). Thus, phase 2 investigates the production of older students than phase one, and additionally introduces topic control in the sense that all texts are argumentative. The results are strikingly similar to those from phase 1, however, indicating that development in phrasal complexity happens at later stages than those covered by this material.

The third and final phase concerns the development in clausal complexity. Biber et al (2011) hypothesize that writers rely less on clausal complexity as they become more sophisticated in their use of complex phrases. As I found little evidence for this increased phrasal sophistication, I decided to investigate the use of clausal features in the same material as that employed in phase 2. The results were mixed: some clausal features exhibited the hypothesized reduction in frequency, but an actual decrease was observed in the use of the more advanced clausal features such as extraposed complement clauses.

References:

Biber, D., Gray, B., & Poonpon, K. 2011. “Should We Use Characteristics of Conversation to Measure Grammatical Complexity in L2 Writing Development.” TESOL Quarterly 45(1), 5–35. https://doi.org/10.5054/tq.2011.244483

Dirdal, H., Hasund, I. K., Drange, E-M., Vold, E., & Berg, E-M. 2022. “Design and construction of the Tracking Written Learner Language (TRAWL) corpus: A longitudinal and multilingual young learner corpus.” Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning 10(2), 115–135. https://doi.org/10.46364/njltl.v10i2.1005

Rørvik, S. 2022. “Noun-phrase complexity in the texts of intermediate-level Norwegian EFL writers: stasis or development?” Nordic Journal of Language Teaching and Learning 10(2), 298-326. https://doi.org/10.46364/njltl.v10i2.987

5 December: Nicholas Groom

NB! CANCELLED!

Note! TUESDAY 5 December at 11.15 in PAM5

Phraseology and epistemology in academic discourse: Constructing and evaluating written knowledge in History and English Literature

Dr Nicholas Groom, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Linguistics, University of Birmingham, UK

In this talk I will present the interim findings of an ongoing corpus-based study of the relationship between phraseology (defined as preferred ways of saying) and epistemology (defined as preferred ways of knowing) in written academic discourse, with a particular focus on two humanities disciplines, History and English Literature. 

The starting point for the analysis is provided by Becher and Trowler’s (2001) oft-cited characterisation of humanities disciplines as being epistemologically “reiterative”, “holistic”, “concerned with particulars, qualities [and] complication”, and as having “understanding” and “interpretation” as their primary goals. The aim of my study is to ask whether and to what extent it is possible to identify phraseological features that express these rather abstract epistemological values in written academic texts produced by professional historians and literary critics. 

The empirical data for the study consist of research articles and book reviews from leading journals representing these two disciplines over a five year period from 2018 to 2022. The methodology of the study is inductive, and focuses on the identification of frequently-occurring constructions in each corpus as revealed by a detailed concordance analysis of statistical keywords belonging to the four main closed grammatical classes: conjunctions, determiners, prepositions and pronouns. 

The results of my analysis suggest (a) that Becher and Trowler’s characterisation of the ‘soft/pure’ epistemology of the humanities remains valid in general terms, and (b) that there are both similarities and differences in the phraseological profiles of the two disciplines studied here. More specifically, my analysis finds that constructions identified in the research articles corpora can be divided into three main epistemological groups, which I will refer to as Complexifying constructions, Relational constructions and Interpretive constructions respectively. My analysis also identifies a fourth group of constructions, Evaluative constructions, which are particularly prominent in my book reviews corpora. I will conclude with some reflections on the theoretical, methodological and pedagogic implications of my research.

Activities spring 2024

23 January: Jack Grieve

The Origins of Double Modals in American English

Jack Grieve, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

(Research conducted with Cameron Morin, Lyon)

In this presentation, I report the results of a large-scale study of variation in the structure and use of double modals in American English. Based on an 8.9-billion-word corpus of geolocated Twitter data collected from across the US between 2013 and 2014, we identify 5,436 occurrences of double modals, including examples of 76 distinct double modal combinations, far more tokens and types than have been observed in decades of research. We then map double modal use in high resolution across the US for the first time. Our results challenge a wide range of assumptions about the nature of double modals, which have been based almost entirely on the intuitions of linguists and their informants. Most notably, we find that double modals are most strongly associated with African American Language. Furthermore, based on this finding, we propose that double modals may have originated with African American as opposed to Scot Irish settlers, as has generally been assumed.

30 January: Kristin Bech

The periphrastic perfect: have + participle in the Ormulum

Kristin Bech, ILOS, University of Oslo

The Ormulum is a biblical exegesis, written by the monk Orm in the 12th century, i.e. in the Early Middle English period. It is written in verse, and the special thing about it is that Orm uses a phonetic spelling system, intended to help the priests pronounce the vernacular language, as many of the priests were speakers of Anglo-Norman after the Norman Conquest.

In Old English, the combination habban ‘have’ + participle was well established, but the functional distinction, according to which an earlier event or state is linked with the present time, was not yet established (Mitchell 1985 I: 296–298).

In the Ormulum there is an abundance of examples of have in combination with a past participle. Although the use of have + participle itself in many instances might be attributed to rhythm, there are instances of word order variation within the rhythmic pattern, as in (i).

(i)

Forr þuss he seȝȝde þær till himm.
Iesumm icc hafe fundenn.                               
Forr þatt he wollde don himm swa.
To sen. & tunnderrstanndenn.
Þatt tatt wass godess sune crist.
Þatt he þa fundenn haffde. (13506–13511)

For thus he said there to him
Jesus I have found. 
For that he would do him so. 
To see and to understand.
That that was God’s son Christ.
That he then found had.

According to Fischer and van der Wurff (2006: 139), the periphrastic perfect has gone through a slow grammaticalization process entailing both formal and semantic shifts, as well as a shift in the context in which the construction occurs. The overall aim of what will eventually be an article is to provide an overview of this construction in the Ormulum, and assess which stage it had reached in the grammaticalization process. The following questions are asked:

- Does have + participle occur with animate or non-animate subjects? In Old English, have had a possessive meaning, and thus the subjects tended to be animate. As have lost that possessive meaning, it began to occur with non-animate subjects (Fischer & van der Wurff 2006: 140).

- Are the verbs transitive or intransitive? Because of the possessive meaning of have in Old English, the associated verb tended to be transitive (Fischer & van der Wurff 2006: 140).

- Does perfect have refer to an activity in the past that is linked to the present moment, or does it rather have present time reference expressing completion, as in Old English? (cf. Fischer & van der Wurff 2006: 140; Elsness 1997: 286).

- What causes word order variation with respect to the position of have and the position of the participle in relation to each other? Does it have to do with main clause versus subordinate clause word order, as example (1) may indicate? Or are there other mechanisms involved?

The overarching question is whether the perfect with have reflects new usage, or whether it is a consequence of the meter in this particular text type – used to create enough syllables and the appropriate rhythm for Orm.

References:

Elsness, Johan. 1997. The perfect and the preterite in contemporary and earlier English. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Johannesson, Nils-Lennart and Andrew Cooper (eds.). 2023. The Ormulum, vols. 1 and 2. Early English Text Society O.S. 360 and 361. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fischer, Olga and Wim van der Wurff. 2006. Syntax. In Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A history of the English language, 109–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax, vols. I and II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

13 February: Nelson Goering

A sound change that never was: Compensatory lengthening after loss of postconsonantal *h in Old English

Nelson Goering, Ghent University

The standard grammars of Old English describe a sound change in which a prehistoric *h in words like *feorhes “of life” was lost with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel: fēores. This sound change was first proposed in 1885 by Eduard Sievers to account for the scansion of such words in verse, and has been widely accepted both in both grammars (e.g. Luick 1921, Campbell 1983, Hogg 1992) and in analyses of Old English metrics (Amos 1980, Fulk 1992). Sievers noticed that words like feores often scan as if they have heavy initial syllables in older Old English poetry, and thought this pointed to genuine phonological length in the vowel. Since words like feores do sometimes also scan with short vowels (and very often so in later Old English poetry), Sievers proposed that the short vowel was eventually analogically reintroduced from the nominative-accusative singular, feorh (since the h was word final, it was not lost and no lengthening took place). Sequences of this shape, *-V̆́ChV-, almost uniformly show the same reflexes in Middle and Modern English as words with no *h, *-V̆́CV-, so that Sievers, and most historical phonologists since, had to assume this analogical process was extremely thoroughgoing, and always operated in the direction of spreading short vowels. I argue that the analogies assumed in these traditional accounts are often implausible, and in some cases impossible. I furthermore offer a reconsideration of the metrical evidence, which was the main motivation for proposing this sound change in the first place. Rather than pointing to a genuine sound change, I suggest that the scansion of feores (etc.) with a heavy initial syllable can be regarded as a metrical archaism. Metrical archaisms are already a widely acknowledged feature of Old English poetry. Words such as þēon “prosper” can be used in verse either in their quotidian monosyllabic forms, or in their historical (but obsolete outside of verse) disyllabic forms, as if still *þīhan, before loss of intervocalic *h. Metrical archaisms are used for their metrical convenience, and become rarer in later Old English verse (Fulk 1992). I argue that words like feores show exactly the same pattern: the metrical data can be understood entirely as a license to scan feores as if it were still pre h-loss *feorhes, while the phonologically regular development to short-vowelled fĕores was available even in early poetry, and became increasingly standard over time as the Old English poetry tradition evolved.

 

Select references

Amos, Ashley Crandell. 1980. Linguistic means of determining the dates of Old English literary texts. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America.

Campbell, Alistair. 1983. Old English grammar. Corrected reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fulk, R. D. 1992. A history of Old English meter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hogg, Richard M. 1992. A grammar of Old English. Vol. 1: Phonology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Luick, Karl. 1921. Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache. Leipzig: Chr. Herm. Tauchnitz.

Sievers, Eduard. 1885. Zur rhythmik des germanischen alliterationverses. II. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 10. 451–545.

12 March: Mona Baker and Eivind Engebretsen

The Oslo Medical Corpus: A Resource and Methodology for Conceptual Research in the Medical Humanities

Mona Baker and Eivind Engebretsen, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, University of Oslo

Among scholars and practitioners of medicine, attention is increasingly being paid to the dynamics of power that operate in the field, including how liberal forms of power have come to dominate the global governance of health. As Engebretsen and Heggen (2015:115) have argued, however, power “does not only operate through knowledge and norms but through language and concepts, and often unconsciously”. Any attempt to redress some of the inequalities that operate in the field of health must therefore begin by questioning the global validity of key concepts that underpin global health policy today, including the concept of global health itself, as articulated in a range of languages. It also requires revisiting some of the foundational concepts of modern, evidence-based medicine, such as ‘evidence’, ‘knowledge translation’ and ‘health literacy’ (Buts et al. 2021). These and other concepts that inform various global health initiatives and practices have come to accommodate a range of different and often conflicting ideological messages, and their meanings inevitably change across time and cultural/linguistic communities.

Against this backdrop, SHE, the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education at the University of Oslo, has launched a programme of research, in collaboration with the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network (Baker et al. 2021; Buts et al. 2021), to support conceptual research in the field of modern medicine and global health. This strand of research draws on a large suite of freely available electronic corpora (the Oslo Medical Corpus), accompanied by a novel, open-source corpus analysis and visualization interface, to support a wide range of conceptual studies. Building on the methodology elaborated by the Genealogies of Knowledge research project (2016-2020), the OMC is a thematic corpus designed to provide access to the use of key concepts such as 'evidence', 'bias', 'risk', 'sustainable development', and 'degrowth' in a wide variety of discourses, from those of global health organisations such as the World Health Organisation and the Centre for Diseases Control to the interventions of community-based collectives situated outside (and at times in tension with) mainstream institutions (such as Health Poverty Action, Medical Justice, and Third World Network). Examples of current funded projects that draw on this resource and methodology will be briefly discussed.

References

Baker, M., J. Buts and H. Jones (2021) ‘Using Corpora to Trace the Cross-Cultural Mediation of Concepts through Time: An interview with the coordinators of the Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network’, Available at: https://genealogiesofknowledge.net/research-network/outputs-and-activities/using-corpora-to-trace-the-cross-cultural-mediation-of-concepts-through-time-an-interview-with-the-coordinators-of-the-genealogies-of-knowledge-research-network/. Chinese translation appeared in Foreign Language Teaching and Research 53(1): 135-146.

Buts, J., M. Baker, S. Luz and E. Engebretsen (2021) ‘Epistemologies of Evidence-based Medicine: A plea for corpus-based conceptual research in the medical humanities’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24: 621-632. https://doi-org.ezproxy.uio.no/10.1007/s11019-021-10027-2.

Oslo Medical Corpus, Corpus Design Criteria: https://www.oslomedicalcorpus.net/corpus-design-selection-criteria/.

16 April: Claire Burridge

The introduction and dissemination of vernacular terminology in early medieval Latin medicine

Claire Burridge, IAKH, University of Oslo

In several pharmaceutical recipes within the so-called Lorscher Arzneibuch, an extensive medical manuscript produced at the Abbey of Lorsch in about the year 800, the unit staupus is used to measure liquids. According to Michael McCormick, this ‘intrusion of the vernacular Frankish term for ‘cup’ (OHG stauf, i.e., staup before the Second Sound Shift) makes clear… that the Lorsch physician composed or reformulated recipes which he actually used’ (McCormick 2001, 713). An examination of a larger sample of early medieval manuscripts, however, demonstrates the widespread appearance and dissemination of the unit staupus within the surviving Latin recipe literature. Notably, staupus occurs not only in manuscripts produced in writing centres around the Latin west, but also in varying textual contexts. For example, staupus appears in the recipes of many large-scale recipe collections (following the Lorscher Arzneibuch model) as well as in recipes that were added to the margins, flyleaves, and other blank spaces of non-medical manuscripts. While I agree with McCormick that the appearance of the term staupus is highly significant, these findings suggest a different interpretation for its significance.

In this paper, I shall first provide an overview of the manuscript evidence and highlight several case studies, including some of my initial results from my work on the MINiTEXTS project. I shall then address the implications of these findings, exploring how the spread of vernacular terminology within early medieval Latin recipe literature can provide insights into the movement of medical knowledge, the relationship between medical knowledge and practice, as well as changing linguistic conditions on the ground.

Reference

McCormick, Michael. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300-900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

7 May: Hildegunn Dirdal and Stine Hulleberg Johansen

Activities autumn 2024

XX August/September: Jacob Thaisen

Here is a list of the group's past activities.

Fellowships and Collaboration

Guest researchers

The research group is happy to receive inquiries from prospective guest researchers but is not in any position to fund stays. Recent self-funded guest researchers include:

Karolina Rudnicka, University of Gdańsk

Sara Albán Barcia, University of Vigo

Shaoije Zhang, Beijing Normal University

Doctoral projects

The research group's host department, ILOS, occasionally advertises PhD fellowships. The research group welcomes projects related to its areas of interest responding to such advertisements. Please visit this webpage for information about the application process and this webpage for information about the PhD programme.

A current PhD project directly linked to the research group is that of Matthias Rusness.

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action postdoctoral fellowships

The research group welcomes inquiries from prospective applicants to the European Commission's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) postdoctoral fellowship programme.

The research group has recently hosted one MSCA project: IMEP DCCP

Published Jan. 14, 2020 3:53 PM - Last modified Feb. 26, 2024 7:12 PM

Contact

Please contact Jacob Thaisen if you want to be on our mailing list.
 

Participants

Detailed list of participants