Recurrent word-combinations in contrast 181
Table 1. Examples of three-word combinations produced by the n-gram lists^5
Three-word
combination
No. of
occurrences
in English
original textsNo. of
occurrences
in English
translated textsNo. of
occurrences
in Norwegian
original textsNo. of
occurrences
in Norwegian
translated texts
a long time 23 103
the same time 18 76
for a moment 37 79
the first time 44 70
all the way 17 49
all the same 13 37
i det hele
(Gloss: on the
whole < 10)
34 51i det minste
(Gloss: in the
least < 10)
20 27The word combinations listed in Table 1 drew our attention in particular, as all of
them have lexical constraints, all are (potentially) meaningful units, some have
fully transparent meaning, some can have fully or semi-transparent meaning,
some are fully opaque, and all have a greater frequency in translated text than in
original text. Thus, these groups of three-word combinations form the basis for
three separate case-studies.
- Methodological issues
Even though n-grams of three (orthographic) words have been shown to be fre-
quent enough in small corpora to yield interesting data for English, this may not
hold for other languages. Norwegian, for instance, like German, tends to form
compounds by joining word stems together whereas English spelling keeps them
apart, as with mobiltelefon versus mobile phone. Furthermore, definiteness is typi-
cally encoded by a suffix in Norwegian, not a separate word such as the, some-
thing that may also influence the size of n (-grams). Moreover, variant spellings
of words and expressions of the language(s) compared should not be underes-
timated. In Norwegian, for instance, i hvert fall (‘at least’) can also be written
- Because the subcorpora in the ENPC are of the same size, raw figures are directly
comparable.