Tertia comparationis in multilingual corpora 13
These seven main senses of ‘betweenness’ do not serve to cover all tokens of
between in the ENPC. There remain a handful of idiomatic usages, as in (16).
(16) Between moving so often and no real training, my father had always done
whatever he could find, taking dead-end jobs that were easy to get and easy
to leave. (TH1)
In (16) between codes a causal relationship. It is due to the fact of his frequent
displacement and lack of training that the writer’s father had to make do with
whatever odd jobs he could pick up. We could paraphrase it with the equally idi-
omatic what with construction.
Examples (8) to (16) are all taken from texts in the ENPC which were
originally written in English. The texts in the OMC were originally written in
Norwegian. As shown in Table 1, all seven types of ‘betweenness’ may be coded
in Norwegian by mellom. In addition mellom may occur in idiomatic expressions.
All tokens of mellom in the OMC were first assigned to one of the seven classes
(eight if we include Idiom) on the basis of the semantic type of predication coded
by the preposition. As described in Section 2, the Norwegian originals were then
set aside and comparisons were drawn between the English and French render-
ings of the various meanings, with the exception of the Scale sense of which there
were only five instantiations. Table 1 shows the distribution of mellom between the
various senses, including idiomatic tokens. Figures for between in the ENPC are
included for comparison.^4
Table 1. Number of tokens of senses of mellom in OMC compared to between in ENPC
Mellom in OMC Between in ENPC
Location 143 33.8% 99 20.4%
Motion 96 22.7% 48 9.9%
Interaction 53 12.5% 96 19.8%
Relationship 53 12.5% 81 16.7%
Comparison 36 8.5% 68 14.0%
Time 22 5.2% 51 10.5%
Idiom 15 3.5% 5 1.0%
Scale 5 1.2% 38 7.8%
Total 423 100.0% 481 100.0%
- The differences between the corpora with respect to the proportions of the various senses
of the two prepositions may be due to the different composition of the two corpora, with only
the ENPC containing non-fictional texts. They may also be due to semantic or pragmatic differ-
ences between the two prepositions themselves. In all likelihood, they are due to a combination
of these two factors.