The article discusses research that charts new lingua franca English data and broadensthe scope of written elf corpora. We illustrate that, apart from the academic domain,there exist various written genres in non-native contexts in which English is used as asecond language resource alongside native languages. These uncharted data can provideus with new ways of approaching the ongoing globalization of English. The newapproach incorporates a broader perspective on elf than previously, seeing it as onestage in the long diachronic continuum of Englishes rather than as an entity emergingin interaction. The first part details a corpus project that produces written multi-genrecorpora suitable for real-time studies of how ongoing variability is reflected in linguafranca use. It is followed by three case studies investigating quantitative patterns ofongoing change in elf. The conclusions suggest that a diachronically-informed angleto lingua franca use offers a new vantage point not only to elf but also to ongoinggrammatical variability. It shows that the traditional and canonized way of seeing nonnativespeakers/writers is not sufficient, nor is the simplified view of norm dependency of non-native individuals.

Echoic, or repetitive, binomials (Mollin 2013: 172; Gustafsson 1975: 9) are a cross-linguistic phenomenon dating back at least to biblical times (tooth for tooth) (Malkiel 1959: 125–126). Such binomials are characterized by a tripartite structure in which two tokens of the same lexical type are linked by the coordinator and or a preposition. The repeated words may be nouns (day by day), adverbs (again and again) or adjectives (smaller and smaller). Although such constructions occur in many languages (Jackendoff 2008: 8), contrastive studies are lacking.

Echoic binomials express a variety of meanings, but in our data as many as three out of four relate to time. The repeated lexical items either already denote concepts of time (hour after hour) or the binomial invokes a temporal or aspectual reading (collapse bit by bit and grow brighter and brighter). Although German and Swedish have corresponding phraseological patterns, parallel corpora reveal that the forms, functions and distributions of these binomials differ cross-linguistically.   

This study is based on the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. A customized script was used to retrieve all relevant occurrences in both source and target texts. Our findings suggest that echoic binomials are equally common in English and Swedish but much rarer in German. In German, competing phraseological patterns are more pervasive, an example being the immer COMP.ADJ construction used for English adjectival binomials (a bigger and bigger hit > einen immer größeren Kick [‘ever bigger’]).

Interestingly, echoic binomials appear to be more common in translations than in originals. About half the instances are translated into corresponding binomials (step by step > steg för steg), and a large number are also “introduced” in translations. In the latter case, echoic binomials fill constructional gaps as when the continuative-iterative reading of the English keep V-ing construction is rendered as the Swedish binomial om och om (igen) (we kept saying > om och om igen sa vi [‘again and again we said’]). Moreover, some language-specific binomials may be “overused” in translations, leading to reduced lexical variation. This is the case for German nach und nach which is a frequent choice for many different English source-text items (gradually, finally, begin to, Ø).

A data-driven approach to echoic binomials enables researchers to uncover cross-linguistic patterns. One notable finding is that when the correspondents are not echoic, meanings still tend to be expressed by related recurring phraseological patterns, e.g., line by line > en rad i taget [‘a line at a time’]. Thus, recurrent meanings tend to be expressed by recurrent patterns.   

References

Gustafsson, Marita. 1975. Binomial expressions in present-day English. Turku: University of Turku.

Jackendoff, Ray. 2008. Construction after construction and its theoretical challenges. Language, 84(1), 8–28.

Malkiel, Yakov. 1959. Studies in irreversible binomials. Lingua 8, 113–160.

Mollin, Sandra. 2013. Pathways of change in the diachronic development of binomial reversibility in Late Modern American English. Journal of English Linguistics 41(2), 168–203.

This study investigates subjective progressives with always/constantly/forever (e.g., you’re always complaining) in American English with data from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). The results show that subjective progressives are increasing but that this shift is restricted to always + progressive. The increase in subjective progressives is linked to colloquialization as reflected in an increasing use of first-person subject pronouns and contracted verb forms. Fiction contains the highest frequency of subjective progressives, largely due to fictional dialogue expressing subjective attitudes. The proportion of negative subjective attitudes decreases slightly towards the end of the 20th century. The material indicates that women are leading the way in the increase in subjective progressives, but there is no difference in women’s and men’s preferences for expressing negative subjective attitudes.

This article concerns English proper noun modifiers denoting organizations, people and places and their German and Swedish correspondences. It supplements previous studies touching upon contrastive comparisons by providing large-scale systematic findings on the translation correspondences of the three aforementioned semantic types. The data are drawn from the Linnaeus University English–German–Swedish Corpus (LEGS), which contains popular non-fiction, a genre previously not studied in connection with proper noun modifiers. The results show that organization-based modifiers are the most common and person-based ones the rarest in English originals. Compounds are the most frequent correspondences in German and Swedish translations and originals with genitives and prepositional phrases as other common options. The preference for compounds is stronger in German, while it is stronger for prepositional phrases in Swedish translations, reflecting earlier findings on language-specific tendencies. Organization-based modifiers tend to be translated into compounds, and place-based modifiers into prepositional phrases. German and Swedish translators relatively often opt for similar target-language structures. Two important target-language differences emerge: (i) compounds with complex heads are dispreferred in Swedish (US news show > *USA-nyhetsprogram) but unproblematic in German (US-Nachrichtensendung), and (ii) compounds with acronyms (WTO ruling >WTO-Entscheidung) are more frequent in German.

We demonstrate an approach that utilizes immersive virtual reality (VR) to explore and interact with corpus linguistics data. Our case study focuses on the language identification parameter in the Nordic Tweet Stream corpus, a dynamic corpus of Twitter data where each tweet originated within the Nordic countries. We demonstrate how VR can provide previously unexplored perspectives into the use of English and other non-indigenous languages in the Nordic countries alongside the native languages of the region and showcase its geospatial variation. We utilize a head-mounted display (HMD) for a room-scale VR scenario that allows 3D interaction by using hand gestures. In addition to spatial movement through the Nordic areas, the interface enables exploration of the Twitter data based on time (days, weeks, months, or time of predefined special events), making it particularly useful for diachronic investigations.

In addition to demonstrating how the VR methods aid data visualization and exploration, we briefly discuss the pedagogical implications of using VR to showcase linguistic diversity. Our empirical results detail students’ reactions to working in this environment. The discussion part examines the benefits, prospects and limitations of using VR in visualizing corpus data.

This paper investigates English supplementive ing-clauses (e.g., Hitler exploded, demanding examples.) in German and Swedish contrast. The material consists of popular non-fiction originals and their translations from the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS) (version 0.1). The results show that coordination is the most frequent correspondence of supplementive ing-clauses in German and Swedish translations and originals. Like the supplementive ing-clause, a coordination is a compressed and semantically indeterminate structure. The other major correspondences include subordination, main clause and prepositional phrase. German translators more often use main clauses than Swedish translators, which seems to be related to an increasing German tendency for parataxis rather than hypotaxis. A number of German and Swedish instances involve different kinds of explicitation, including conjunctions and German pronominal adverbs.