The noun phrase (NP) is one of the prime sites where languages show different preferences. A key issue is that while some languages like English and German typically place a lot of information before the NP head, others, such as Swedish, seem to prefer the postposition (e.g., Ström Herold/Levin 2019). This study targets English noun premodifiers, also referred to as noun sequences (e.g., Biber/Grieve/Iberri-Shea 2009; Biber/Gray 2016; Smitterberg 2021). Two examples are given in (1) and (2) with their German and Swedish translations: 

(1) a BBC photographer (LEGS; En. original)     

einen BBC-Fotografen ['a BBC-photographer'] (Ge.)     

en fotograf från BBC ['a photographer from the BBC'] (Sw.)

(2) bumblebee habits     

die Verhaltensweisen von Hummeln ['the habits of bumblebees'] (Ge.)      

humlors levnadsvanor ['bumblebees' habits'] (Sw.)

As illustrated above, noun sequences may contain proper (BBC) or common nouns (bumblebee), and the translations showcase different correspondence types, ranging from compounds to prepositional phrases (PPs) and genitives. Although there is an abundance of monolingual research on English noun sequences, contrastive studies are largely lacking (recent exceptions being Berg 2017, Ström Herold/Levin 2019 and Kosmata/Schlücker 2022). In our study we explore English noun sequences through the lens of German and Swedish correspondences, addressing the following research questions:

1. What are the German and Swedish correspondences of English noun sequences, and how are these distributed?
2. How do the categorial status of the modifiers (common or proper noun) and the semantic relationship between modifiers and heads affect the distributions of correspondences?
3. What do the German and Swedish correspondences tell us about language-specific preferences, and/or translation-related effects, such as explicitation and implicitation (Baker 1993)?

Our data originate from the five-million-word bidirectional Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS). The corpus consists of contemporary non-fiction texts, such as popular science and history. Using a bidirectional translation corpus has clear advantages for contrastive studies: (i) the texts express the same meanings (i.e., equivalence), and (ii) they may uncover language patterns that would otherwise remain hidden. The condensed and information-focused nature of the LEGS texts make them optimal for our study of information density. We extracted noun sequences in English originals and translations from tagged text files (3,000 tokens in all), and classified them according to formal and functional features. Contrary to our initial expectations, highly condensed 3+-part sequences (insect wing frequencies) are rare (10%), and thus we focus mainly on 2-part sequences. 

Our study shows that the most common correspondence type – regardless of language and translation direction – is the compound noun (cf. Berg 2017), at about 70%. No significant difference is attested between German and Swedish translations in this respect, which indicates that the two languages are equally compound-prone. Despite the strong links between noun sequences and compounds, there is still sizeable proportions of non-compounds. A key difference between German and Swedish translations emerges in the strong Swedish preference for PP postmodification (see, (1)), supporting previously reported differences in German and Swedish NP modification (Ström Herold/Levin 2019).

The study also shows that the categorial status of the English premodifier is a relevant factor for the correspondence type in both languages. Common noun premodifiers favour compounds more strongly than proper nouns do, and with proper nouns, German uses more compounds than Swedish does. This is partly due to Swedish avoiding compounds with acronyms (NATO bombs > NATO-Bomben (Ge.) / Natos [GEN] bomber (Sw.)).

As for semantics, the most prevalent relationships between heads and modifiers in the English originals are KIND and PURPOSE (in all 40% of all tokens). The latter of these is particularly associated with compounding in translations (war elephants > Kriegselefanten (Ge.) / stridselefanter (Sw.)). A semantic relation disfavouring compounds in the German and Swedish translations is LOCATION, where PP postmodifiers are common (tthe Oakland airport > flygplatsen i Oakland (Sw.) [‘the airport in Oakland’]).

From the wide range of correspondence types in our data, we find cases where the premodifier has been omitted. Sometimes, this is used to reduce redundancy and repetition of the text topic (drug connoisseurs > Ø Connaisseure (Ge.)), which is a case of implicitation (Baker 1993). Explicitation (ibid.), on the other hand, is exemplified in the addition of a specifying premodifier (juice (Sw.) > fruit juice). Translation-related effects thus have an impact on the choice of correspondences.

References

Baker, Mona (1993): Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In: Baker, Mona/Francis, Gill/Tognini-Bonelli, Elena (eds.): Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 233–250.

Berg, Thomas (2017): Compounding in German and English. A quantitative translation study. Languages in Contrast 17(1), 43−68.

Biber, Douglas/Gray, Bethany (2016): Grammatical complexity in academic English. Linguistic change in writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biber, Douglas/Grieve, Jack/Iberri-Shea, Gina (2009): Noun phrase modification. In: Rohdenburg, Günter/ Schlüter, Julia (eds.): One language, two grammars? Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 182–193.

Kosmata, Eva/Schlücker, Barbara (2022): Contact-induced grammatical change? The case of proper name compounding in English, German, and Dutch. In: Languages in Contrast, 22(1), pp. 77–113. 

Smitterberg, Erik (2021): Syntactic change in Late Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ström Herold, Jenny/Levin, Magnus (2019): The Obama presidency, the Macintosh keyboard and the Norway fiasco: English proper noun modifiers in German and Swedish contrast. In: English Language and Linguistics 23(4), pp. 827–854.