Discourse-structuring functions of initial adverbials in English and Norwegian news and fiction

Abstract

This chapter explores the discourse-structuring functions of initial adverbial adjuncts in English and Norwegian news and fiction. Such discourse functions have to do with discourse linking and information management. The corpus study reveals frequency differences in the use of initial adjuncts across the languages, which are to some extent connected with an overall greater frequency of adjuncts in Norwegian. While initial adjuncts in fiction often signal cohesive relations, those in news are more typically due to backgrounding of less important information or to framing/scene-setting for the clause message. Norwegian initial adjuncts are even less likely than English ones to convey new information; on the other hand, initial position is to a lesser extent associated with contrastive focus in Norwegian. This, together with the higher frequency of initial adjuncts in Norwegian, suggests that initial placement of adjuncts carries a lower degree of markedness in Norwegian than in English.

Marked themes in English and Norwegian academic texts in the field of didactics

“…She investigates 14 texts within genres like "textbooks", "academic papers" and "the modern novel", and illustrates that different text types make use of different themes, but without formulating any clear-cut distinctions between different text types. Further support for the claim that text type influences thematic structure can be found in a study of initial adjuncts in news and fiction (Hasselgård, 2014), where it is shown that these two genres differ both as regards the frequency of initial adjuncts, which are more common in fiction than in news, and in the meanings expressed by them, with the most prominent difference being that initial adjuncts expressing 'time' are more frequent in fiction than in news.…”

“…But here it is clear that Norwegian L2 writers of English have adapted better to English discourse conventions than the Danish L2 writers investigated by Shaw, and indeed the present L2 writers have managed to comply with English discourse conventions despite the cross-linguistic difference resulting from the lower frequency of marked themes functioning as Adjuncts in L1Nor. Hasselgård (2014) found more initial adjuncts in Norwegian than in English, in both news and fiction, which indicates that the text-type or genre also affects the use of marked themes functioning as Adjunct.…”

“…Future studies of the kind reported on here would do well to include this variable, but for present purposes we refer to Hasselgård (2014), who did not find more initial adjuncts realized by non-finite clauses in English than Norwegian.…”

“…Danish and Norwegian are very closely related languages, so Shaw's results form a very important basis for comparison with the results of the present study. The final contrastive study to be included in this overview has already been briefly introduced above, where its results were mentioned as evidence for text-type/genre differences: Hasselgård (2014) not only examined differences between news and fiction, but also between English and Norwegian texts belonging to these two genres/text types. She found slightly higher proportions of initial adjuncts in Norwegian than in English, and also some differences in the types of meanings expressed by these adjuncts: in the fiction material, 'time' was more frequently expressed in Norwegian than in English.…”

“…Text structure is a recurring topic in the literature, and studies have suggested that the structure of a text may be influenced by text type (Davies, 1997, Hasselgård, 2014, the discipline within which the text is written (Hyland, 2000, North, 2005b, Ebrahimi et al, 2014, Ebrahimi, 2016, Babaaii et al, 2016, the language in which it is written (Hasselgård, 2005) and the language background of the writer (Hasselgård, 1998, Rørvik, 2013. It has also been shown that different languages may have different means of realization for the same text-structuring function (Moyano, 2016).…”