The way of the world: the colligational framework “the N1 of the N2” and its Norwegian correspondences

Abstract

The English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus is used to study the colligational framework “the N1 of the N2” (e.g. the way of the world). The aim is to discover recurrent patterns in the lexical and semantic make-up of such sequences in English and their correspondences in Norwegian. The correspondences are described in terms of both structure and meaning. In spite of similarities in the structural potential of English and Norwegian noun phrases, the majority “the N1 of the N2” sequences have divergent correspondences in Norwegian. This points to differences between the languages in their preferred lexicogrammatical patterns. The study confirms the feasibility of carrying out crosslinguistic studies on the basis of patterns of function words.