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Part of
Time in Languages, Languages in Time
Edited by Anna Čermáková, Thomas Egan, Hilde Hasselgård and Sylvi Rørvik
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 101] 2021
► pp. 129–154

From language to language, from time to time

Echoic binomials from an English-German-Swedish perspective

| Linnaeus University
| Linnaeus University

This study is situated within the broader field of phraseology and concerns repetitive, echoic binomials such as day by day (NPN) and on and on (‘ADV and ADV’). While the bulk of previous research has focused on their use in individual languages (Jackendoff 2008; Ziem 2008), this study takes a comparative approach, using data from two parallel corpora: the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The results indicate that binomials, in particular of the NPN type, are most frequent in Swedish originals. In English originals, they are rare and not very productive. In translations, frequencies closely mirror those in their originals, but other recurrent patterns (e.g., one X at a time) are also commonly used as correspondences.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Material and method
    • 3.Echoic time binomials
    • 4.Results
      • 4.1Echoic time binomials in English, German and Swedish originals
      • 4.2Echoic time binomials in English originals and translations
      • 4.3German and Swedish correspondences to English echoic time binomials
        • Binomials
        • Patterns
        • Simple
        • Zero
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 September 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.101.06lev
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