Shallow features as indicators of English–German contrasts in lexical cohesion

Abstract

This paper contrasts lexical cohesion between English and German spoken and written registers, reporting findings from a quantitative lexical analysis. After an overview of research aims and motivations we formulate hypotheses on distributions of shallow features as indicators of lexical cohesion across languages and modes and with respect to register ranking and variation. The shallow features analysed are: highly frequent words in texts, lexical density, standardized type-token-ratio, top-frequent content words of the language within individual registers and texts, and several types of Latinate words. Descriptive analyses of the corpus are then presented and statistically validated with the help of univariate and multivariate analyses. The results are interpreted relative to our hypotheses and related to the following properties of texts in terms of lexical cohesion: semantic variability, cohesive strength, number and length of nominal chains, degree of specification of lexis, and degree of variation along all of these properties.

Corpus-based contrastive studies

“…Another important trend is the increasing attention to register, as evidenced in e.g. Xiao & McEnery (2010), Lefer & Vogeleer (2014), Aijmer & Lewis (2017) and Kunz et al (2018). As Aijmer & Lewis point out in the introduction to their edited volume, "the contrastive point of view highlights the dependences of the patterns on different social and cultural practices in the compared languages" (2017: 3).…”

“…Monolingual studies (such as Biber 1988) have already established that lexicogrammatical features vary across registers, while cross-linguistic studies may find that registers vary in different ways or to different extents (e.g. Biber 2009, Kunz et al 2018. Fløttum et al (2006: 54) report that in their study of research articles in English, French and Norwegian, language was a less important variable than scientific discipline for the majority of the linguistic features examined.…”