About the group
Our group’s core members are linguists based in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS); our associated members are based at institutions in Norway and abroad. We all have in common an empirical approach to the English language and English linguistics, with our data drawn primarily from a variety of written sources of present-day and historical English.
Some of us work exclusively with English, and some engage in contrastive work, asking questions that cut across English and other languages, particularly Norwegian.
By letting our theoretical work be informed by naturally occurring data, we proudly continue the long-standing tradition of corpus-based research initiated by the late Stig Johansson.
Research interests
Our research interests fall into two broad areas: contrastive corpus linguistics and historical linguistics.
Those of us engaged in contrastive corpus-based studies make use of learner corpora and parallel corpora to explore lexicogrammatical and semantic differences between English and Norwegian. Furthermore, we use corpora of texts produced by language learners to investigate features of second/third language acquisition and non-native speech and writing.
Those of us with research interests in historical linguistics ask questions about aspects of Old and Middle English syntax (e.g. word order and information structure) and of Middle English dialectology (e.g. computational modelling of written texts), using electronic corpora, and sometimes comparing older stages of English to other old languages.
Beyond these main areas, we also have expertise in English grammar, syntax, phraseology, manuscript studies, and philosophy of language.
Activities
Our group has met approximately once a month for many years. In the autumn semester of 2026, we meet in PAM 4 on selected Tuesday afternoons at 16:15 (to about 17:15).
1 September: Kristin Bech, ILOS
Northern, southern, eastern, western, middle, upper, lower.
Old English positional predicates
Old English has a peculiar and under-researched type of adjective which differs from regular adjectives, namely the so-called positional predicates (Pfaff 2015, 2024). Examples are given in (1) and (2).
(1)
on þæm lande norþweardum
in the.DAT land.DAT northward.DAT.STR
‘in the northern part of the land’
(2)
on norðanweardne þisne middangeard
in northward.ACC.STR this.ACC world.ACC
‘in the northern part of this world’
There are several things to note here: First, this type of adjective can both precede and follow the noun, unlike the vast majority of Old English adjectives, which are prenominal (Bech et al. 2024). Second, when it is prenominal, it occurs before the determiner, unlike all other adjectives in Old English. Third, the adjectival inflection is strong, even in definite noun phrases, again unlike all other adjectives. Fourth, the meaning is not restrictive, e.g. ‘in the northern land’, but rather partitive ‘in the northern part of the land’. It has been suggested that this type of adjective has some kind of adverbial interpretation (Fischer 2001, Grabski 2017, 2020). Positional predicates are found in other old Germanic languages as well, in Present-day Icelandic, and in Latin and Greek (Pfaff 2024, Fontanals ms), which suggests that it might be a feature inherited from the proto language.
This paper presents an empirical study of the positional predicates norðeweard, suðeweard, easteweard, westeweard, middeweard, ufeweard, neoðeweard (with spelling variations). The examples in (1) and (2) show the prototypical use of these adjectives, and I discuss possible factors determining pre- or postnominal position. However, the situation in Old English is not as straightforward as in these examples; quite a few occurrences deviate from the expected use. I argue that this is due to an ongoing change in the linguistic system, yielding constructions that seem mixed or uncertain. All in all, this particular construction can be described as a vestige of the proto-linguistic past while also signalling future developments.
Bech, Kristin, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova, and George Walkden. 2024. Noun phrase modifiers in early Germanic: A comparative corpus study of Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. In Noun phrases in early Germanic languages, ed by. Kristin Bech and Alexander Pfaff, 71–109. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Fischer, Olga. 2001. The position of the adjective in (Old) English from an iconic perspective. In The motivated sign. Iconicity in language and literature 2, ed. by Olga Fischer and Max Nänny, 249–276. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fontanals, Jaume Mateu. Ms. The structural position between summus mons and Sicilia amissa revisited.”
Grabski, Maciej. 2017. The position of the adjective in Old English prose. A corpus study. University of Łódź. Doctoral dissertation.
Grabski, Maciej. 2020. Three types of Old English adjectival postposition: A corpus-based Construction Grammar approach.” Journal of English Linguistics 48(2): 166–198.
Pfaff, Alexander. 2015. Adjectival and genitival modification in definite noun phrases in Icelandic: A tale of outsiders and inside jobs. University of Tromsø. Doctoral dissertation.
Pfaff, Alexander. 2024. Positional predicates in early Germanic. In Noun phrases in early Germanic languages, ed by. Kristin Bech and Alexander Pfaff, 365–399. Berlin: Language Science Press.
28 September (Monday): Diana Santos, ILOS
Corpus studies of food and drink in Portuguese: an appetizer
I will first present the annotation of the semantic field of food and drink in a corpus of literary prose (novels, short stories) in Portuguese (mainly from the 19th century and early 20th century), describing the categories used and the main challenges, as well as providing a short quantitative overview of the data.
Then a variety of interesting aspects, as well as different ways of measuring and/or visualizing them, will be discussed:
- a question of units: expressions vs. words
- measure of regular polysemy in this domain (container vs. measure, animal vs. food, etc.)
- suggestion of "natural categories" in this domain (meat, pork, or pork steak?)
- metaphorical uses and idiomatic expressions in this domain
I finish with an array of different research questions that can be – and I wish to – pursue in the future.
27 October: Signe Ebeling and Hilde Hasselgård, ILOS
Interaction in contrast: Questions and responses in English and Norwegian spontaneous conversation and fictional dialogue
Research into question-answer adjacency pairs has received much scholarly attention in recent years. One point of interest is how stable such Q-A sequences are across languages (Enfield et al. 2010). The present study aims to contribute to this research field by conducting a corpus-based study of direct content questions along with the responses that are elicited by such questions in an English-Norwegian contrastive perspective.
Two types of corpus material form the basis for the comparison: spontaneous conversation and fictional dialogue, taken from the English and Norwegian components of the International Comparable Corpus (ICC) and the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), respectively. Hence the study involves a register comparison as well as a cross-linguistic analysis.
Content questions (introduced by wh-/hv-) were selected because their preferred responses will be more elaborate than a simple yes/no (Stenström 1984). In a content question, the question word (Q-word) represents unspecified information, which is often classified as being ‘a chunk of missing information’ (Givón 1993), a ‘gap of unknown information’ (Quirk et al. 1985). The purpose of the question is to make the unknown information known (Faarlund et al. 1997). Example (1) can serve as an illustration. The Q-word who/hvem refers to an unknown participant, whose identity (we/vi) is supplied in the answer.
(1)
"Who is going to pay for it?"
"We are" (ENPC: DL2)
"Og hvem skal betale for det, da? "
"Vi, vel.” (DL2T)
Our study is guided by the following research questions:
• What are the frequencies and linguistic characteristics of content questions in English and Norwegian fictional dialogue and spontaneous conversation?
• What structural and functional types of response are elicited by content questions across languages, registers and functional types of question?
Given that English and Norwegian are closely related languages, we can expect much similarity in the way questions and answers work. However, “formal similarity is no guarantee that there is identity of use” (Johansson 2012). Furthermore, to our knowledge, no contrastive study has compared content questions and their responses between English and Norwegian (or other Scandinavian languages, see Axelsson 2020). The inclusion of responses with the questions places the study at the intersection of cross-linguistic lexico-grammar and pragmatics, which is another novel feature of contrastive corpus linguistics.
This is still work in progress, but the general impression so far is that Q-words and Q-forms behave relatively similarly in fictional dialogue and conversation in English, both in terms of frequency and linguistic characteristics. There are more differences between the registers in the Norwegian material, both regarding frequency and the distribution of Q-forms per Q-word, in particular. One cross-register difference that applies to both languages, though, is that fictional characters more frequently seek answers as to the reason why something is the case, as attested by the markedly more frequent use of why/hvorfor in fictional dialogue compared to conversation. Cross-linguistically, some notable, and perhaps expected, differences have been found in the more frequent use of clefts in Norwegian questions, as well as the use of how, and not its (intuitive) counterpart hvordan, as a modifier (e.g. how old is he). In both English and Norwegian, the content questions generally get a response, and most of the responses can be characterised as answers, i.e. they provide the information requested by the Q-word. There is a slight register difference in both languages in that more questions seem to go unanswered in fictional dialogue, possibly because responses are sometimes narrated rather than reported directly.
References
Axelsson, K. (2020). Questions in English and Swedish fiction texts: A study based on parallel and comparable corpus data. Languages in Contrast, 20(2), 235–262.
Enfield, N.J., Stivers, T., & Levinson, S.C. (2010). Editorial: Question-response sequences in conversation across ten languages: An introduction. Journal of Pragmatics 42, pp. 2615–2619.
Faarlund, J. T., Lie, S., & Vannebo, K. I. (1997). Norsk referansegrammatikk. Universitetsforlaget.
Givón, T. (1993). English grammar: A Function-based introduction, Volume 1. Benjamins.
Johansson, S. (2012). Cross-linguistic perspectives. In M. Kytö (Ed.), English corpus linguistics: Crossing paths, pp. 45-68. Rodopi.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman.
Stenström, A.-B. (1984). Questions and responses in English conversation. CWK Gleerup.
17 November: Lacey Okonski, ILOS
PrepApp: A tool for the teaching and learning of prepositions
This talk presents a digital tool for teaching and learning the usage patterns of English prepositions using an Embodied Scenes approach. Building on corpus linguistic investigations and insights from Cognitive Linguistics, we present the usage patterns of prepositional constructions in line with how spatial relations are typically used to construe meaning. The tool is intended to empower students of English to increase confidence in their L2 skills through usage-based examples. In two previous studies (Okonski & Johansson Falck, 2025), we tested a set of sample lessons targeting the preposition into. Data were collected from ESL classes at Swedish High Schools. Results show that the Embodied Scenes approach led to proficiency in using into and this was maintained over time. Current work on expanding the tool to address more prepositions and testing the tool in Norway and Croatia will also be presented as a work in progress. This work in progress is done in collaboration with Ljiljana Saric and Marlene Johansson Falck.
Okonski, L., & Johansson Falck, M. (2025). The effect of the Embodied Scenes approach to preposition learning with PrepApp. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 12(1) 70-106, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/cogls.22020.oko
