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.

‘Native-like’ use of discourse markers is a good indicator of language proficiency. Analysing four subcorpora of English-language tweets posted by Twitter users from the Nordic countries of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, this study considers the effects of discursive context and L1 influence on the correlation between semantic function and sentence position of the discourse marker actually. The study shows that both predictors appear to have a significant effect. A more formal context predicts more standard punctuation, distribution of the pragmatic functions, and placement of the discourse marker, and L1 influence is reflected in the preferred sentence position, with a substantial and significant difference observed between the Finnic and Germanic L1s. Furthermore, the study shows that while the discourse marker actually is significantly more frequent in colloquial Twitter language than in spoken English, the frequency is significantly lower and in line with spoken English in more constrained contexts.

This study is situated within the broader field of phraseology and concerns repetitive, echoic binomials such as day by day (NPN) and on and on (‘ADV and ADV’). While the bulk of previous research has focused on their use in individual languages (Jackendoff 2008; Ziem 2008), this study takes a comparative approach, using data from two parallel corpora: the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The results indicate that binomials, in particular of the NPN type, are most frequent in Swedish originals. In English originals, they are rare and not very productive. In translations, frequencies closely mirror those in their originals, but other recurrent patterns (e.g., one X at a time) are also commonly used as correspondences.