When contrasting two or more languages, we often notice language-specific preferences that would ... more When contrasting two or more languages, we often notice language-specific preferences that would otherwise go under the radar. In this sense, the German author and politician Walther Rathenau had a point: Comparison is central to our thinking but also, from our perspective, to the understanding of languages. In this vein, we invited contributions to a contrastive pre-conference workshop at the 43rd ICAME 1 conference, Corpus Linguistics: A New Normal?, hosted by Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, July 27-30, 2022. The theme of the contrastive workshop, Comparing Crosslinguistic Complexity, opened up for contributions exploring structural differences and degrees of complexity on both microand macro-levels of texts, comparing English with at least one other language based on parallel (translation) or comparable corpora. This special issue of Languages in Contrast comprising a collection of six papers is the result of our endeavours in investigating differences in complexity across languages. Altogether, it discusses English in comparison with four different languages: German, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish, both in different broader genres such as fiction and non-fiction texts, but also sub-registers such as fiction narrative and fiction dialogue, and newspaper editorials and magazine articles. All in all, the six contributions shed new light on crosslinguistic complexity with English as one of the nodes. We hope that this special issue can inspire further forays into this area. The contributions in this volume are presented below. These range from comparative corpus studies on lexical (word-formation) complexity, morphosyntactic complexity, and phrasal and clausal complexity. The paper by Magnus Levin and Jenny Ström Herold addresses the case of morphologically complex English premodifiers adjoined by hyphens, so-called 'hyphenated premodifiers' (e.g., self-propelled (guns)), and their correspondences in German and Swedish. This trilingual study draws on data from the Linnaeus
This study concerns English hyphenated premodifiers (science-based targets; lower-back pain) cont... more This study concerns English hyphenated premodifiers (science-based targets; lower-back pain) contrasted with their German and Swedish correspondences. The data stem from the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS), which contains non-fiction texts, but comparisons are also made to fiction texts from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). The study shows that these condensed and complex premodifiers are more frequent in English originals than in English translations, and more typical of the non-fiction genre than that of fiction. Information density and terminological precision thus seem to be more important factors for the use of hyphenated premodifiers than creativity and expressiveness. In original English, two-thirds of the righthand elements are either nouns or ed-participles. In translated English, numerals as left-hand elements (three-page document) are less frequent than in original English. Regarding German and Swedish correspondences, around half are premodifiers. Postmodifiers in the form of prepositional phrases and relative clauses are more frequent in Swedish than in German, which instead "overuses" premodifying extended attributes. Compound adjectives/participles and compound nouns are the most frequent correspondences in both German and Swedish. In almost half the instances, German and Swedish translators choose the same correspondents, indicating a high degree of similarity in the structural preferences in the two target languages.
Advances in historical sociolinguistics, Nov 24, 2017
This article makes use of big and rich present-day data to revisit the social network model in so... more This article makes use of big and rich present-day data to revisit the social network model in sociolinguistics. This model predicts that mobile individuals with ties outside a home community and s ...
Give and Take : A contrastive study of light verb constructions in English, German and Swedish
This paper investigates light verb constructions (LVCs) with give/geben/ge and take/nehmen/ta in ... more This paper investigates light verb constructions (LVCs) with give/geben/ge and take/nehmen/ta in English, German and Swedish in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. ...
Yolanda Fernández-Pena, Reconciling synchrony, diachrony and usage in verb number agreement with complex collective subjects. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. Pp xv + 226. ISBN 9780367417154
Visualizing dynamic text corpora using Virtual Reality
In recent years, data visualization has become a major area in Digital Humanities research, and t... more In recent years, data visualization has become a major area in Digital Humanities research, and the same holds true also in linguistics. The rapidly increasing size of corpora, the emergence of dyn ...
The NAFTA signing, a Luftwaffe staff officer and a Västerbotten family : English proper noun modifiers in German and Swedish contrast
Although previous studies of English proper noun modifiers have touched upon contrastive aspects ... more Although previous studies of English proper noun modifiers have touched upon contrastive aspects with other languages (see, e.g., Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2013; Schlucker 2013: 464–5; Breban 2017: 13), t ...
This thesis concerns agreement with collective nouns in American, British and Australian English.... more This thesis concerns agreement with collective nouns in American, British and Australian English. It is based on material from newspaper corpora and spoken corpora. The findings suggest that dialectal, stylistic, diachronic, syntactic and semantic factors interact in the selection of singular and plural agreement. It was shown that there are differences between regional varieties, between speech and writing and between written and spoken genres. Syntactic influence on agreement was seen in the increased likelihood of plural agreement with increased distance between the noun (the controller) and its agreement-carrying words (the targets). This was observed both in the number of intervening words between a controller and its targets and in the difference between verbs, which are fairly close to their controllers, and pronouns. This trend was found in both speech and writing. These findings suggest that targets acquire more independence of the form of their controllers the further away they are. Semantic factors were also found to be important in British English. The noun itself plays a crucial role in the choice of agreement. A noun such as 'government' very rarely takes singular verb agreement, whereas 'family' takes either singular or plural agreement, and 'couple' generally prefers the plural. A few verbs were found to require singular agreement with collective nouns (e.g. 'consist', 'be set up', 'increase'), but other verb categories (e.g. 'think', 'say', 'work') were not found to influence agreement decisively. These and other features described indicate that a wide range of functional factors influence variation in agreement patterns.
Translating textual indeterminacy : English supplementive ing-clauses and their German and Swedish translations
Subordinatorless supplementive ing-clauses (as in Hitler exploded, demanding examples) are charac... more Subordinatorless supplementive ing-clauses (as in Hitler exploded, demanding examples) are characterized by their “considerable indeterminacy as to the semantic relationship to be inferred” ( irk e ...
This paper presents the Nordic Tweet Stream, a cross-disciplinary digital humanities project that... more This paper presents the Nordic Tweet Stream, a cross-disciplinary digital humanities project that downloads Twitter messages from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The paper first introduces some of the technical aspects in creating a real-time monitor corpus that grows every day, and then two case studies illustrate how the corpus could be used as empirical evidence in studies focusing on the global spread of English. Our approach in the case studies is sociolinguistic, and we are interested in how widespread multilingualism which involves English is in the region, and what happens to ongoing grammatical change in digital environments. The results are based on 6.6 million tweets collected during the first four months of data streaming. They show that English was the most frequently used language, accounting for almost a third. This indicates that Nordic Twitter users choose English as a means of reaching wider audiences. The preference for English is the strongest in Denmark and the weakest in Finland. Tweeting mostly occurs late in the evening, and high-profile media events such as the Eurovision Song Contest produce considerable peaks in Twitter activity. The prevalent use of informal features such as univerbated verb forms (e.g., gotta for (HAVE) got to) supports previous findings of the speech-like nature of written Twitter data, but the results indicate that tweeters are pushing the limits even further.
From the BBC to the PFC and CAPTCHA : Acronym typology from a cross-linguistic perspective
Acronyms are prevalent and increasingly frequent both in English (Leech et al. 2009: 212–213) and... more Acronyms are prevalent and increasingly frequent both in English (Leech et al. 2009: 212–213) and other languages, such as German (Steinhauer 2000: 1), a development which mirrors the increasing so ...
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Papers by Magnus Levin