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Adverbial Clauses in English and Norwegian Fiction and News

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Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres

Part of the book series: Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics ((YCLP,volume 5))

Abstract

This paper considers the placement of adverbial clauses in English and Norwegian with regard to their form, meaning, information status and semantic relation to the matrix clause proposition. The study is based on comparable original texts in both languages, representing two registers: fiction and news reportage. End position of adverbial clauses is most common in both languages, with initial position as an alternative in many cases. Positional freedom is found to differ greatly between finite and non-finite clauses, and also across different semantic types of adverbial clauses. For those types of adverbial clauses that vary across positions, mostly time and contingency clauses, information status (new vs. anchored) is found to have some influence. Iconic order was found to be less important, but was more noticeable in fiction than in news. The placement of adverbial clauses seems to be guided by similar principles in both languages. Register differences are identified in both languages, but they do not show consistent patterns.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The reason for regarding such constructions as clauses rather than phrases is that they invariably contain a proposition and are also clause-like in their positional preferences; see Hasselgård (2010: 37).

  2. 2.

    Examples (1) and (2) come from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC). In ENPC examples the original is given first. Norwegian examples are followed by a word-for-word translation, while the published (idiomatic) translation is followed by a tag ending in -T.

  3. 3.

    The calculation took only initial and end position into account.

  4. 4.

    Examples from the Norwegian newspaper material are accompanied by a translation (produced by the author) intended to show the structure of the original without being entirely literal.

  5. 5.

    Note that the study of information structure is restricted to time and contingency clauses, which are the only ones to vary between initial and end position.

  6. 6.

    In fact, Fisher’s exact test shows it to be highly significant for the selection of position, at p < 0.0001 for all parts of the material.

  7. 7.

    Significance according to Fisher’s exact test: English news vs. English fiction: p = 0.1006; Norwegian news vs. Norwegian fiction: p = 0.3894; Norwegian fiction vs. English fiction: p = 0.1235; Norwegian news vs. English news: p = 0.4114.

  8. 8.

    Diessel (2008: 474) reports a slight majority of initial placement of “prior” temporal clauses, and of the temporal clauses placed in initial position, a clear majority reflect iconic order. However, the adverbial clauses in end position do not reflect iconicity to the same extent (ibid.: 475).

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Corpus Material

  • English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC), excerpts from Toril Brekke, Jacarandablomsten/The Jacaranda Flower (TB1), Lars Saabye Christensen, Jokeren/The Joker (LSC2) and Øystein Lønn, Tom Rebers siste retrett/Tom Reber’s Last Retreat (OEL1), see www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/enpc/

  • International Corpus of English, British component (ICE-GB).: www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice-gb/, texts W2C-001, 002, 015, 018, 020 (press reportage) and W2F-001, 002, 003, 007, 012 (fiction).

  • Norwegian newspapers – news articles from the online versions of some Norwegian national daily newspapers 3 March 2011 (Dagsavisen, Aftenposten, VG, Vårt Land, Klassekampen, Nationen, Dagens Næringsliv)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Hilde Hasselgård

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  1. Hilde Hasselgård
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Correspondence to Hilde Hasselgård .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Karin Aijmer

  2. Department of English and Lerma Research Centre, Aix Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Diana Lewis

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Hasselgård, H. (2017). Adverbial Clauses in English and Norwegian Fiction and News. In: Aijmer, K., Lewis, D. (eds) Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54556-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54556-1_6

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54556-1

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