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ABSTRACT
The present study contributes to contrastive Germanic-Slavic linguistics through an empirical investigation of Norwegian compounds and corresponding constructions in Russian. First, it is demonstrated that five Russian constructions function as frequent equivalents of Norwegian compounds: simplex word, adjective + noun, noun + noun in the genitive, noun + prepositional phrase, and compound. Second, it is shown that the five Russian constructions differ in frequency, with simplex word as the most widely used option and compound displaying the lowest frequency. Third, it is proposed that although the choice between the Russian constructions is not fully predictable, it is possible to state statistical tendencies, and to this end five prototypical patterns are discussed in detail. Finally, it is argued that the Norwegian-based prototypical patterns must be supplemented with Russian-based generalizations that capture the meanings of the Russian constructions that correspond to Norwegian compounds.
Notes
* I would like to express my gratitude to Atle Grønn, who generously provided access to parallel texts and to Robert Reynolds and Uliana Sentsova, who provided technical assistance. My heartfelt thanks also go to Linn Thea Kaldager Josefsen, Jens Kristian Skjølsvold, Håkon Sverdrupsen and Irina Zubchenko for help with annotation. Earlier versions of this research were presented at the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference (St. Petersburg, 2007), Uppsala University (2017), and the AATSEEL conference (Washington, DC, 2018). I am indebted to these audiences as well as Laura Janda and other colleagues in the CLEAR (Cognitive Linguistics: Empirical Approaches to Russian) research group at UiT The Arctic University of Norway for a number of valuable suggestions. The dataset analyzed in this article is available in TROLLing – The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics at http://doi.org/10.18710/0U0KN2
1 While it seems clear that “one-to-many situations” are challenging for L2 learners, it is a debated question how important this factor is compared to other factors that influence language learning (Collins et al. Citation2009). I will not discuss this question in the present article.
2 The exact definition of compounds in Norwegian is controversial (Johannessen Citation2001). Are compounds in Norwegian best described as words with stems consisting of two stems or words with stems consisting of two words? I will not discuss this question which is tangential to my study.
3 The RuN corpus is available at www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/run/corpus/. Notice that it was not possible to use the RuN corpus directly, since Norwegian compounds and their Russian equivalents have no formal properties that would make it possible to identify them through regular corpus searches. It was therefore necessary to use the texts the corpus is based on, and merge and annotate these texts.
4 Whether this indicates that Russian in general uses more abbreviations than Norwegian is a question that must be left open for further research.
5 With regard to the fifteen relations listed in (5a–o), it is interesting to notice that only three of the relations (participant, part of whole, and source) turn out to be relevant for the CART analysis. Whether this indicates that a less fine-grained classification with fewer relations may be more useful for the analysis of compounds, is a question that must be left open for future research.
6 The statistical analysis has shown that these four components are of different value as predictors, and as we will see, some components are left unspecified in some of the prototypical patterns.
7 It may seem superfluous to specify that the relation is “time” when the non-head is a temporal noun. However, there are a few examples where temporal non-heads arguably involve other relations than “time”. A case in point is minuttviser ‘minute hand (on a watch)’ where the relation can be analyzed as “participant”, since minutt ‘minute’ is the patient argument (what is shown by the minute hand).
8 For the purposes of the present study, I disregard exceptional examples like fedreland ‘fatherland’ where the non-head is an inflected form, in this case the plural form fedre of far ‘father’ (Faarlund et al. Citation1997: 62).