Corpus-based Studies in Contrastive Linguistics at the University of Oslo

there is a long-standing tradition of corpus-based contrastive studies, dating back to the early 1990s when the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus project was initiated by Stig Johansson (of the former Department of British and American Studies). Since then, other projects have followed, notably Språk i kontrast (directed by Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen and Stig Johansson), the Russian-Norwegian (RuN) corpus project (directed by Atle Grønn), and the Information Structure and Word Order Change in Germanic and Romance Languages (ISWOC) project (directed by Kristin Bech and Kristine Eide), and the Portuguese multi-corpus project AC/DC (directed by Diana Santos), which since 2011 has been associated with ILOS. Further initiatives have also contributed to a growing interest in contrastive studies, extending into more and more languages. Fruits of these efforts were in evidence at the departmental seminar that took place on the 15th of May 2013, focusing in its entirety on corpus-based contrastive studies. With 14 papers (18 presenters) and close to 50 participants altogether, the event clearly demonstrated the standing this area of research has come to occupy within the department. Moreover, the papers revealed what a multifaceted field this is, through the diversity of topics covered, the number of languages compared, the types of corpora used, and the different methodological and theoretical frameworks applied. In the first paper, atle grønn explores the temporal organization of counter-factual conditionals with focus on the perfect auxiliary ha (= 'have') in Norwegian. Data from the Oslo Multilingual Corpus show that languages like English, German and French are much more well-behaved at the syntax-semantics interface when it comes to the use of the past perfect in counterfactuals. In Scandinavian (and Dutch) the temporal auxiliary is often semantically redundant both in the antecedent and consequent of counterfactual conditionals. silje susanne alvestad presents an analysis of aspect in Slavic imperatives based on her PhD thesis defended at ILOS in 2013. Her comparative study involves twelve different Slavic languages with examples taken from the ParaSol corpus. The different distribution of imperfective and perfective aspect in Slavic