Adverbial Clauses in English and Norwegian Fiction and News

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.

Time adverbials in English and Norwegian news discourse

“…This is in line with previous studies of when-clauses, e.g. Ford (1993) and Hasselgård (2017b). Both after-clauses and the much less frequent Norwegian counterpart with etter at select initial position much less frequently than when/når-clauses (c. 10% vs. c. 40%) and also less frequently than the average for finite clauses in both languages (Figure 5).…”

“…Other contrastive studies that discuss adverbials and/or other temporal expressions in English and Norwegian include Ebeling and Ebeling (2017) and Hasselgård (2017aHasselgård ( , 2017b. Ebeling and Ebeling, using a parallel corpus of fictional texts, find that recurrent n-grams with temporal meaning are significantly more frequent in Norwegian than in English (2017: 22).…”

“…It is observed that "a temporal n-gram is more likely to be clausal in Norwegian than in English, which might point in the direction of higher frequencies of both temporal adverbial clauses and time adverbs," since clausal n-grams are often identified as temporal by the presence of a time adverb (2017a: 96 f.). Hasselgård (2017b) studies the placement of adverbial clauses, including temporal ones, in English and Norwegian fiction and news. The two languages are found to be rather similar in this respect, preferring end position for most clause types (conditional ones being an exception), with initial position as the second-most frequent choice and very little use of medial position.…”