Languages in Contrast - Online First

The aim of this paper is to explore and contrast the morphosyntactic and semantic features of two equivalent nonce echo constructions (NECs) expressing disapproval and annoyance (i.e. don’t (you) X me and ni X ni Y) in colloquial English and Spanish. A NEC is defined as a reactive clause containing duplicated words of the initiative, showing the property of nonceness, and having a communicative goal. Two types of NECs are found in both languages: an attitudinal echo construction and a referential one, the former being more idiomatic than the latter. Based on the premise that texts are necessarily dialogic, two sets of examples are obtained from English corpora (The Movie Corpus, The TV Corpus, and the Corpus of American Soap Operas); and from two Spanish corpora and a dataset (CREA, CORPES XXI, and the Dataset of Spanish Dialogic Texts Online). Findings suggest that both languages show negative and restricted syntactic templates. Variables are coinages that originate from the processes of conversion in English (e.g. don’t you John me) and gender polarity in Spanish (e.g. ni luna ni *luno). Hence, although both types of variables are morphologically novel and contextually meaningful, Spanish variables are generally ungrammatical and unlikely to exist outside the discursive frame under study.

N‑gram analysis (popularized e.g. by Biber et al., 1999 ) has become a popular method for the identification of recurrent language patterns. Although the extraction of n‑grams from a corpus may seem straightforward, it proves to be very challenging when applied cross-linguistically (cf. e.g. Ebeling and Ebeling, 2013 ; Granger and Lefer, 2013 ; Čermáková and Chlumská, 2017 ). The major issue is that the quantities of n‑grams of a certain length in typologically different languages do not correspond. Consequently, n‑grams of a given length may function differently across languages, rendering a direct comparison inadequate. Our paper introduces a function capable of modelling the relation between the quantities of n‑grams in typologically distant languages, using the example of Czech and English (and some other language pairs). Based on our model, we can suggest what n‑gram lengths should be contrasted to better reflect the size of n‑gram inventories in each language. The correspondence may not be intuitive (e.g. a Czech 2-gram may best correspond to an English 2.5-gram), but it still provides researchers with a general guide as to what might be useful to include in their analysis (e.g. in this case 2-grams in Czech and 2- and 3-grams in English).

Hedging is a complex phenomenon with an indefinite number of potential realisations. The complexity and versatility of hedging strategies make them particularly interesting to study across languages. This contrastive study compares the realisations of the pragmatic function of hedging in everyday Norwegian and English conversations using data from four corpora of Norwegian and English informal spoken conversations (the Norwegian Speech Corpus, the Nordic Dialect Corpus, the BigBrother corpus, and the BNC2014). The results show that speakers of both languages mainly use pragmatic particles, adverbs, and first-/second-person pronouns + cognitive verbs [1/2 pers. + Cog. V] to express hedging. Furthermore, English speakers use significantly more [1/2 pers. + Cog. V] and modal verbs than Norwegian speakers, who use significantly more adjectives, prepositional phrases and clauses to hedge their utterances.