Languages in Contrast - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2000

This article deals with the opposition between the present perfect and the preterite in English and Norwegian from a contrastive point of view. The use of these verb forms is very similar in the two languages, and markedly different from that in closely related languages such as German and French, where the present perfect is used much more widely. In English and Norwegian the preterite is the norm if the reference is identified as being to past time which is clearly separate from the deictic zero-point, for instance through adverbial specification, while the present perfect is used of situations extending from the past all the way up to the deictic zero-point, and of situations located within such a time span. In many intermediate cases, where the reference is to a loosely defined past time, either verb form may be used in both languages, although several writers have claimed that the present perfect is more common in Norwegian than in English in such cases. The difference between the two languages is more distinct if the reference is to what can be seen as unique past time, in which case the present perfect is usually blocked in English but very common in Norwegian. Also, the so-called inferential perfect in Norwegian is not matched by any similar perfect use in English. These claims are amply confirmed by an investigation of the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), where the present perfect is more frequent in the Norwegian as compared with the English sections, at the expense of the preterite. Moreover, there is found to be a marked difference between the original and the translated texts of the ENPC: the ratio between the present perfect and the preterite is generally higher in Norwegian than in English but not quite so high in Norwegian texts translated from English as in Norwegian original texts, and somewhat higher in English texts translated from Norwegian than in English original texts. This difference is ascribed to interference from the source language in the translated texts.

The English temporal adverb again and the corresponding adverb igjen in Norwegian are words which do not encode a concept but rather an instruction to the audience to let the inferential phase of their comprehension process be guided by a specific contextual assumption. These adverbs have a procedural semantics in the sense of Relevance Theory, which distinguishes them semantically from an expression like once more or the prefix re-, both of which encode a conceptual meaning. English has a single lexical entry again whose encoded meaning is temporal yet not truth-conditional, and there is an exact correspondent igjen in the Norwegian lexicon, though Norwegian igjen in addition appears as two distinct non-temporal words encoding a concept and as a verbal particle forming a lexical entry together with a preceding verb. The full use range of the form igjen is found to be very similar to that of the Latin(ate) prefix re- as well as to the complex meaning of the verbal prefix ga- in the Niger-Congo language Ewe.

This article shows how the approach of Contrastive Analysis can be combined with that of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis in what has been called the Integrated Contrastive Model (Granger 1996a). Through the illustration of English and French causative constructions, it is demonstrated that corpus contrastive data can help explain some of the characteristics of learners’ interlanguage and thus throw new light on the key notion of transfer, which emerges as a more complex phenomenon than was traditionally assumed.

This article offers an overview of comparative syntactic research covering the Scandinavian languages in the last couple of decades. Most of this research has been conducted within Principles-and-Parameters theory, mostly its Government-Binding phase, and a brief outline of theoretical developments in the 70’s leading up GB theory is included. Comparative Scandinavian syntax research is exemplified both by studies contrasting Scandinavian languages as a whole with English, by studies examining contrasts between Insular and Mainland Scandinavian, and finally with regard to some internal Mainland Scandinavian differences.

Bengt AltenbergUniversity of LundSweden