Languages in Contrast - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2024

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 right-hand 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.

Corpus-based contrastive studies have successfully addressed the empirical study of crosslinguistic similarities and differences and may also contribute to understanding complexity across languages. This paper aims at (dis)proving whether the Spanish subjunctive mood shows greater complexity than its English correspondences as translations or sources of the Spanish subjunctive forms. It also explores a trade-off between language levels, i.e., whether higher morphological complexity is linked to syntactic and lexical complexity. The data come from a bidirectional English-Spanish corpus, and the word-alignment-based metric system has been used to quantify morphological complexity. Syntactic and lexical complexity were also investigated and computed using tests of statistical significance. Results corroborate that Spanish presents higher complexity in this verbal area in all three levels, morphological, syntactic, and lexical: the hypothesized trade-off between higher morphological complexity on the one hand, and lower syntactic and lexical complexity on the other is not validated by our data.

This study focuses on the seemingly simple grammatical category of adjectives. However, the framework adopted for analysing adjectives from both a cross-linguistic and a cross-register perspective highlights features of grammatical complexity within phrases as well as contrastive complexity within and across languages and registers. Using English-Norwegian comparable data from the fictional sub-registers of narrative and dialogue, the analysis uncovers both similarities and differences in the structural and semantic features of adjectives. Most notable is perhaps the impact of register at all levels of analysis, including adjectival function (attributive vs. predicative), the degree of phrase complexity and semantic class. The contrastive analysis proper, i.e. comparing adjective use across languages, reveals that English and Norwegian have more in common within each sub-register than across them. For example, the lexico-grammatical behaviour of adjectives in English narrative has more in common with Norwegian narrative than it has with English dialogue. To the extent that there are clear general differences between English and Norwegian, these are mainly found in the proportions and preferences of a few specific features.

This paper reports on a study of verbal help constructions in English and Norwegian. It is based on data from the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus, and discusses 11 constructions in all, nine of which have a close parallel in the other language. The constructions vary in syntactic complexity from the simple intransitive, on the one-hand, to complex-transitives containing infinitive complements, on the other. The hypothesis is advanced that the simpler the basic syntactic structure of a construction, the more likely it is to be translated by a construction with a similar syntax. This hypothesis receives no support from the data. On the contrary, it is more complex constructions, containing an explicit helpee, that are more likely to be translated by a syntactically similar construction.

This paper investigates concessive markers, primarily subordinators, in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. The initial question is how English and Norwegian concessive markers compare with regard to their frequencies and syntactic functions, both intra- and cross-linguistically. Overall, the languages are relatively similar. However, individual concessive markers differ in frequency, syntactic flexibility and possibly formality in original texts in both languages. The second research question concerns the placement of concessive clauses. Again the languages are rather similar, but there is variation within both languages, with subordinators having individual positional preferences. Finally, the translations of the subordinators are examined. Concessive markers are overrepresented in Norwegian translations and underrepresented in English translations compared to originals. While translation correspondences are often congruent, the mutual correspondence between pairs of subordinators is low. Changes made in translation suggest that Norwegian chooses coordination more often than English, thus displaying less syntactic complexity.

We use Universal Dependencies (UD) for the study of cross-linguistic diachronic syntactic complexity reduction. Specifically, we look at whether and how scientific English and German minimize the length of syntactic dependency relations in the Late Modern period (ca. 1650–1900). Our linguistic analysis follows the assumption that over time, scientific discourse cross-linguistically develops towards an increasingly efficient syntactic code by minimizing Dependency Length (DL) as a factor of syntactic complexity. For each language, we analyse a large UD-annotated scientific and general language corpus for comparison. While on a macro level, our analysis suggests that there is an overall diachronic cross-linguistic and cross-register reduction in Average Dependency Length (ADL), on the micro level we find that only scientific language shows a sentence length independent reduction of ADL, while general language shows an overall decrease of ADL due to sentence length reduction. We further analyse the syntactic constructions responsible for this reduction in both languages, showing that both scientific English and German increasingly make use of short, intra-phrasal dependency relations while long dependency relations such as clausal embeddings become rather disfavoured over time.