Gunnar Bergh

Loan translations versus direct loans: The impact of English on European football lexis

Football language may be regarded as the worlds most widespread special language, where English has played a key role. The focus of the present study is the influence of English football vocabulary in the form of loan translations, contrasted with direct loans, as manifested in 16 European languages from different language families (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, etc.). Drawing on a set of 25 English football words ( match, corner, dribble, offside , etc.), the investigation shows that there is a great deal of variation between the languages studied. For example, Icelandic shows the largest number of loan translations, while direct loans are most numerous in Norwegian; overall, combining direct loans and loan translations, Finnish displays the lowest number of English loans. The tendencies noted are discussed, offering some tentative explanations of the results, where both linguistic and sociolinguistic factors, such as language similarity and attitudes to borrowing, are considered.

Complex extractions in a diachronic perspective

This paper deals with the structure and usage of extractions in historical English texts. Based on a corpus of 1.4 million words covering the language from Old English to the present day, it concentrates on how complex extractions are realized in terms of multiple embedding and multiple fronting. Apart from some purely descriptive work, including an account of common subtypes, the aim is to investigate the recursive power of these constructions in actual usage, and to determine how well their different variants fit into selected grammatical frameworks. The results of the study show that complex extractions have been part of the English language throughout its history. Yet, these constructions, realized by means of either relativization or topicalization, turn out to be rather infrequent, and clearly more so than the work of many grammarians suggests. While theoretically unbounded in nature, they seem to be practically restricted to a complexity level of two or three, apparently due to the limiting effects of different perceptual, cognitive and stylistic factors. As regards their integration into syntactic theory, it is shown that whereas multiple embedding is a tractable structure in most contexts, multiple fronting presents problems for both generative and functional grammar, and seems best handled through the principles of dependency grammar.