Danish equivalents to English ing clauses

Authors

  • Niels van Leeuwen University of Copenhagen

Keywords:

grammar, semantics, English, Danish, contrastive linguistics

Abstract

The present article is about English adverbial present participle clauses (‑ing clauses) and their relation to Danish. The purpose of the investigation is to describe how the information expressed in ‑ing clauses is expressed in Danish, in which this grammatical construction normally does not occur. The data consists of English ‑ing clauses and translational equivalents found in the parallel corpus European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus. It is discovered that equivalent English and Danish expressions typically have the same semantic role despite being structured differently, but that the semantic role is usually more explicit in Danish. This is because the frequent absence of explicit subordinator in ‑ing clauses makes their semantic role understandable only through context whereas the different structures of the Danish equivalents often include an explicit indicator of the semantic role.

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Published

2019-02-19

How to Cite

van Leeuwen, N. (2019). Danish equivalents to English ing clauses. Journal of Language Works - Sprogvidenskabeligt Studentertidsskrift, 3(2), 49–74. Retrieved from https://tidsskrift.dk/lwo/article/view/112504

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Articles