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Article published In:
Comparing Crosslinguistic Complexity
Edited by Jenny Ström Herold and Magnus Levin
[Languages in Contrast 24:1] 2024
► pp. 84–108

Simple and complex help constructions in English and Norwegian

A contrastive study

| Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

This paper reports on a study of verbal help constructions in English and Norwegian. It is based on data from the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus, and discusses 11 constructions in all, nine of which have a close parallel in the other language. The constructions vary in syntactic complexity from the simple intransitive, on the one-hand, to complex-transitives containing infinitive complements, on the other. The hypothesis is advanced that the simpler the basic syntactic structure of a construction, the more likely it is to be translated by a construction with a similar syntax. This hypothesis receives no support from the data. On the contrary, it is more complex constructions, containing an explicit helpee, that are more likely to be translated by a syntactically similar construction.

Keywords: help constructions, agentivity, infinitive complements, zero translations, English/Norwegian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies
  • 3.Corpus, theory and method
  • 4.The help constructions in the two languages
    • 4.1SV: Intransitive help constructions
    • 4.2SVO: Transitive constructions with direct object helpee
    • 4.3SVA: Constructions with the task specified in an adverbial
    • 4.4SVOA: Constructions containing helpee with the task specified in an adverbial
    • 4.5SV + infinitive: Constructions with the task specified in an infinitive clause
    • 4.6SVO + infinitive: Constructions containing helpee with the task specified in an infinitive clause
    • 4.7Minor constructions
      • 4.7.1God as helper
      • 4.7.2SVO with direct object not coding helpee
      • 4.7.3Constructions with a negated can verb and a help verb
      • 4.7.4Passive help
      • 4.7.5Reflexive help in English
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Summary and suggestions for future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpus and dictionaries
Published online: 16 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00036.ega
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