'There' and 'it' in a cross-linguistic perspective : a parallel corpus study of English dummy subjects and their translation equivalents in Norwegian and German

Abstract

The aim of the present thesis is to introduce the topic of dummy or grammatical subjects in English, Norwegian and German and to investigate their relative frequency in a multiple parallel corpus set up by the University of Oslo. The main research areas behind this investigation concern contrastive language typology of individual syntactic, lexical and semantic devices employed in information processing on the sentence level, as well as discourse structuring on the text level. The study is biased towards English, as all corpus data are taken from the English-Norwegian-German part of the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. The thesis briefly explores such syntactic patterns as presentatives, clefts, impersonal passives, specifying constructions, extraposition, and other constructions that make use of semantically empty – dummy - subjects. Through the comparison of the individual dummy subject construction types and their translation equivalents, I will attempt to illustrate that individual subject choices often reveal interesting similarities, as well as differences, between the investigated languages. The syntactic patterns under the study are often interrelated on different levels and provide an interesting background for the discussion of the grammatical possibilities of the individual languages, their information structural resources in following the functional sentence perspective, and their preferences in the assignment of thematic roles to individual sentence subjects. The qualitative analysis presented in this study treats the level of syntax, lexis and discourse semantics as joint premises.