HF seminar 15 May 2013
Johan Elsness
Clausal modifiers in noun phrases: a comparison of English and Norwegian based on the Oslo
Multilingual Corpus
The structure of the noun phrase is largely the same in English and Norwegian. One feature shared
by the two languages is that noun phrases often contain clausal postmodifiers. However, there are
marked differences in the types of clauses occurring: Postmodifying clauses in Norwegian tend to be
finite relative clauses, while in English there is much more variation, connected with the general fact
that infinitive clauses, –ing clauses and past participle clauses are common non-finite alternatives in
that language. Thus Norwegian Gutten som satt bakerst i rommet may correspond to English The boy
sitting at the back of the room as well as to The boy who was sitting / sat at the back of the room.
Even the boy at the back of the room, where most analysts would probably hesitate to recognise any
postmodifying clause at all, may well be more common in English than a Norwegian noun phrase like
gutten bakerst i rommet. As for English infinitive clauses, the lady to see about applications for
promotion might again have a likely finite correspondence in Norwegian, e.g. damen du/vi/man bør
snakke med om søknader om forfremmelse. However, Norwegian may also use infinitive clauses as
postmodifiers in noun phrases: en dame å regne med. English noun phrases with postmodifying past
participle clauses again seem likely to have finite correspondences in Norwegian: the food left over
from yesterday / maten som er igjen fra I går.
In this talk results will be reported of an investigation of these and other correspondences in the
English-Norwegian section of the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (the ENPC). To the extent that tagging is
available, that is used in the investigation to focus the comparison on relevant occurrences. For
example, the English Original Fiction section of the ENPC contains 4,631 occurrences of the lexical
item that. According to the tagging (which in this case seems reasonably accurate), only 850 of those
occurrences represent the relative pronoun that. The tagging further shows that 716 of the 850 cases
have som in the Norwegian correspondence, which might be taken to mean that in those but not in
the remaining cases Norwegian also has a finite relative clause. That, however, would be a hasty
conclusion. For one thing, there is the possibility of using the zero relative in Norwegian (as in
English), which escapes the tagging; secondly, since the perlTCE search engine compares
correspondences between sentence units, all cases where the corresponding sentence contains som
in other functions than as a translation of English that will also be captured. Since my investigation is
concerned with cross-linguistic comparison at the phrase level rather than at the sentence level,
extensive manual post-analysis is therefore called for in such cases. For that purpose random
samples are investigated.
Searches of the corpus as a whole start from the predominant patterns noted in each of the two
languages, such as the various types of finite and non-finite clause.
Questions pursued in the investigation include:
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Any difference according to direction of translation? Any sign of interference from source
language in the case of translated texts?
Any difference between fiction and non-fiction?
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Any difference between the direct speech and the narrative passages of fictional texts?
Any difference personal/non-personal (animate/inanimate) reference of noun-phrase head?
Any difference between restrictive and non-restrictive postmodifiers in the two languages?
Connection premodifying/postmodifying structure
Does the choice of type of modifying clause depend on the overall length of the noun phrase
(in terms of number of words)?
Any sign of postmodifying -ing clauses as markers of imperfectivity? Cf. the general
imperfective meaning of finite progressive verb forms in English, made up of -ing preceded
by BE.
Some relevant literature:
Aarts, Bas (1992), Small clauses in English: the nonverbal types. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter
Fabricius-Hansen, Cathrine and Dag Haug (eds.) (2012), Big events, small clauses: The grammar of
elaboration. Berlin: De Gruyter
Johansson, Stig (2007), Seeing through multilingual corpora: On the use of corpora in contrastive
studies (esp. Ch. 11, ‘Why change the subject? On changes in subject selection in translation from
English into Norwegian’). Amsterdam: John Benjamins
HF seminar 15 May 2013.docx
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11 February 2013 at 3:36 PM