Oslo Interactive English - om bruk av tekstkorpora i språkundervisning

Første gang publiceret i UNEV nr. 7: E-læring i sprogfag, juni 2006, red. Signe Hvid Maribo og Ole Lauridsen. ISSN 1603-5518.Artikkelen beskriver et nettbasert verktøy for korpusbasert språklæring, Oslo Interactive English, som har blitt utviklet ved Universitetet i Oslo. Opplegget består hovedsakelig av et engelskspråklig korpus og et bredt utvalg av interaktive språkoppgaver som på ulike måter utfordrer studentene til å ta korpuset i bruk. Hensikten er å få til både en aktiv form for språklæring og en innføring i korpusbruk til oppslag og til språkforskning. Målgruppen for Oslo Interactive English er begynnerstudenter i engelsk, som foreløpig bruker det som supplement til den øvrige undervisningen i engelsk språk

Using the ENPC and the ESPC as a Parallel Translation Corporus: Adverbs of Frequency and Usuality

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Time adverbials in English and Norwegian news discourse

This chapter examines time adverbials in English and Norwegian as evidenced in two corpora of news articles. The adverbials are identified through a manual, bottom-up procedure, and their syntactic realizations, semantic types and positions are analysed. The comparison includes the lexical realizations of time adverbials in both languages, partly through the lens of lexical priming. Similarities between the languages include the distribution of syntactic and semantic types of time adverbials. Cross-linguistic differences in adverbial placement are evident in clause-medial position, where English is more restrictive than Norwegian. The lexical comparison shows that the languages may differ in how similar meanings are realized. Furthermore, the lexical priming of some frequent lexical items reveals lexeme-specific and possibly register-specific patterns

In the case of theme: Topic identifiers in English and Norwegian academic texts

This paper investigates the use of clause-initial constituents prefaced by topic-identifying expressions such as in terms of, in the case of and their Norwegian counterparts. The focus is on the nature, frequency and discourse functions of these in a corpus of published academic writing in English and Norwegian and across three disciplines. Such expressions are rather infrequent overall, but medicine uses them the least and linguistics the most in both languages. The functions of the construction can be compared either to those of left dislocation or to other types of clause-initial adverbials depending on the degree of coreference between the theme and some element in the rheme. The pattern with coreference is more common in Norwegian than in English. Generally, topic identifiers are used for announcing explicitly a theme that represents a topic shift or a contrast with the preceding discourse. The study contributes to contrastive pragmatics through its focus on the discourse-pragmatic functions of the expressions under study and the cross-linguistic comparison of this type of information structuring device across two disciplines of academic writing

Phraseological teddy bears: frequent lexical bundles in academic writing by Norwegian learners and native speakers of English

This chapter compares frequent four-word lexical bundles in a learner corpus (VESPA) and a native speaker corpus (BAWE), both representing novice academic writing. The frequencies and dispersion of bundles in the two corpora reveal patterns of both over- and underuse among the learners. The learners are shown to use some bundles very frequently, but frequencies drop more sharply than in the native corpus. The dispersion of the frequent bundles tends to be broader in the native speaker corpus. In a closer scrutiny of four selected bundles the novice-expert dimension is addressed by consulting a corpus of published research articles. Contrasts between English and Norwegian are also considered in order to explain the learners’ apparently non-native usage. Some of the most overused bundles seem to have been generalized by the learners to fit into contexts where native speakers rarely use them; these can be described as ‘phraseological teddy bears’. Pedagogical applications of the results should start from the underused items in order to broaden the phraseological repertoire of the learners

Lexicogrammar through colligation: Noun + Preposition in English and Norwegian

Title and editors of special issue: CROSSING THE BORDERS:ANALYSING COMPLEX CONTRASTIVE DATA.Edited by Anna Čermáková, Signe Oksefjell Ebeling, Magnus Levin and Jenny Ström Herold. This study compares sequencesof noun and preposition in English and Norwegian usingdata from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. One purpose is to test the use of sequences of part-of-speech tags as a search method for contrastive studies. The other is to investigate the functions and meanings of prepositional phrases in the position after a noun across the two languages. The comparison of original texts shows that the function of postmodifier is most frequent in both languages, with adverbial in second place. Other functions are rare. English has more postmodifiers and fewer adverbials than Norwegian. Furthermore, theprepositional phrases express locative meaning, in both functions, more frequently in Norwegian than in English. The study of translations reveals that the adverbials have congruent correspondences more often than postmodifiers, particularly in translations from English into Norwegian

Language Contrasts, Language Learners and Metacognition: Focus on Norwegian Advanced Learners of English

This chapter discusses metacognitive cross-linguistic awareness in language learning with a focus on Norwegian advanced learners of English. It is argued that even rather proficient language learners can benefit from explicit knowledge of differences and similarities between their first language and their second, exploiting the potential for positive transfer and avoiding negative transfer. Three small-scale studies illustrate language contrasts and learner behaviour in the use of modal auxiliaries, modal combinations, and topic identifiers. A parallel corpus is consulted to uncover differences between English and Norwegian before corpora of Norwegian-produced L2 English and novice L1 English are explored to find out whether the cross-linguistic differences are reflected in the learner output. In a complementary investigation, a group of university students express their views on the value of L1/L2 comparisons in L2 learning. The predominant attitude is that knowledge of similarities and differences between the languages is beneficial, although linguistic self-consciousness and hypercorrection may also arise from such knowledge. It is suggested that the corpus techniques illustrated in the chapter may help teachers and learners notice relationships between the L1 and the L2, which in turn may foster cross-linguistic awareness and metacognition

Sentence-initial indefinite subjects in English and Norwegian

The present study uses the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus to investigate the frequency and use of indefinite noun phrases as subjects in English and Norwegian. Since subjects in both languages tend to appear clause-initially, indefinite subjects represent a deviation from the information principle. The clearest difference between the languages is the greater frequency of indefinite subject NPs in English. The lexicogrammatical features of the indefinite subjects and their immediate contexts are relatively similar in both languages. The indefinite subjects most commonly occur with intransitive verb phrases, and often in clauses with presentative or generic meaning. Translation correspondences of indefinite subjects show that the subject NP is retained in congruent form in the majority of cases, but more changes are made in translations from English into Norwegian than the other way round. This is taken to support the findings of the contrastive analysis and furthermore indicates that the light subject constraint is applied more strictly in Norwegian than in English

Additive conjunction across languages: ‘dessuten’ and its correspondences in English and French

The present study investigates the Norwegian additive connective ‘dessuten’ and its correspondences in English and French. The investigation is based on material from parallel corpora with the language pairs Norwegian-English and Norwegian-French. Since neither English nor French has any clearly favoured counterpart to ‘dessuten’, the wide range of correspondences lends itself to a study of the semantic field of additive conjunction. The individual correspondences of ‘dessuten’ differ as regards the degree of emphasis given to the conjunction and as to the relative weighting of the conjoined segments. The position of ‘dessuten’ is found to have an impact on the choice of overt vs. zero correspondence and also on the choice of lexical correspondence. By means of the semantic mirror method a semantic map of additive conjunction, as seen from the perspective of ‘dessuten’, is outlined

Sentence-initial indefinite subjects in English and Norwegian

The present study uses the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus to investigate the frequency and use of indefinite noun phrases as subjects in English and Norwegian. Since subjects in both languages tend to appear clause-initially, indefinite subjects represent a deviation from the information principle. The clearest difference between the languages is the greater frequency of indefinite subject NPs in English. The lexicogrammatical features of the indefinite subjects and their immediate contexts are relatively similar in both languages. The indefinite subjects most commonly occur with intransitive verb phrases, and often in clauses with presentative or generic meaning. Translation correspondences of indefinite subjects show that the subject NP is retained in congruent form in the majority of cases, but more changes are made in translations from English into Norwegian than the other way round. This is taken to support the findings of the contrastive analysis and furthermore indicates that the light subject constraint is applied more strictly in Norwegian than in English