Time adverbials in English and Norwegian news discourse

Abstract

This chapter examines time adverbials in English and Norwegian as evidenced in two corpora of news articles. The adverbials are identified through a manual, bottom-up procedure, and their syntactic realizations, semantic types and positions are analysed. The comparison includes the lexical realizations of time adverbials in both languages, partly through the lens of lexical priming. Similarities between the languages include the distribution of syntactic and semantic types of time adverbials. Cross-linguistic differences in adverbial placement are evident in clause-medial position, where English is more restrictive than Norwegian. The lexical comparison shows that the languages may differ in how similar meanings are realized. Furthermore, the lexical priming of some frequent lexical items reveals lexeme-specific and possibly register-specific patterns.