Setting the stage for a fresh look at some Experiencer verbs (like amaze, intrigue, or move, revo... more Setting the stage for a fresh look at some Experiencer verbs (like amaze, intrigue, or move, revolt etc.) the paper begins with an attempt to characterize the current Construction Grammar (CxG) paradigm against a backdrop of well established historical analyses of specificity levels in terms of ‘collocation vs. colligation ’ (Firth) or even ‘etic vs. emic ’ (Pike), and to view the familiar opposition between specific/lexical and schematic/formal expressions from a new vantage point as a continuum rather than a dichotomy. One obvious candidate for a CxG reanalysis is the motley group of verbs loosely referred to as Psychological Predicates, and particularly the fifty or so physical/emotive Experiencer verbs (e.g. revolt) which display a systematic dualism between a literal “physical action ” in-terpretation and a more metaphorical “psychological reaction ” interpretation, each participat-ing in their respective (and distinct) grammatical constructions. The crucial point is how to con...
HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 2017
This article takes up the important issue of distinguishing popular from professional texts using... more This article takes up the important issue of distinguishing popular from professional texts using economic texts as the object of analysis. It reports on a limited corpus study of authentic texts produced by native English professionals and published for na-tive English readers, but differing in the nature of intended audience (lay/expert). Economics/electronic money transactions constituted the textual domain/subdomain, and the dominant text type was expository. Following a basic quantitative check and a tentative readability ranking the text samples were scrutinized with respect to lexical profile, frequency band penetration, terminological density and uniqueness. A detailed collocation study was then made of focal multi-word terms as well as personal pronouns. Standard corpus techniques were employed in exposing regularities and produ-cing supporting documentation. At the same time possible reflections of communicative situation, pragmatic purpose and semiotic significance were n...
The paper presents early results of a 3-year project to establish an English – Norwegian textand-... more The paper presents early results of a 3-year project to establish an English – Norwegian textand- term database (TERMINEC) representing the special languages of about 30 Economics/Administrative subdomains, sampled from textbooks, research articles and newspaper/journal material. Initial sampled text for each language will be of the order of half a million words, to be expanded by regular monitoring. The English-language textbank is approaching 20% of this volume and already allows pilot testing of available software for text bank operation, term extraction and management. By trawling through a subset of this preliminary test corpus we are able to make a number of observations about the lexical makeup of the three subcorpora. Although the current holdings are far too small to produce representative results, they demonstrate some of the types of lexical-terminological knowledge that can be extracted from raw text through the study of frequency ranking and contamination, lexical weirdness ratios, collocations and multi-word sequences. TERMINEC will thus be able in the future to take on the role of clearinghouse and reference point for professional communication.
FORUM Revue internationale d’interprétation et de traduction / International Journal of Interpretation and Translation, 2004
Le présent article vise à décrire les défis spécifiques de la traduction de textes relevant d’un ... more Le présent article vise à décrire les défis spécifiques de la traduction de textes relevant d’un domaine spécialisé. Après un bref prologue thématisant les limites du traduisible dans le contexte de la traduction philosophique, j’esquisse ma position théorique relative aux langues de spécialité, et présente un modèle général du processus de traduction avant d’entrer dans le vif du sujet, à savoir les domaines de savoir spécialisé et les sous-langages s’y rapportant dont les éléments communicatifs essentiels sont des concepts indépendants d’une langue particulière traduits par des termes spécifiques à chaque langue. Je discute ensuite brièvement quelques exemples qui semblent indiquer que le traducteur, en passant de la terminologie propre à la langue source à celle de la langue cible, dépasse les limites du traduisible. Ces exemples étayent ma conclusion générale selon laquelle la traduction de textes spécialisés pose des défis d’un tout autre ordre que la traduction de textes relev...
Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/157466/1/76... more Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/157466/1/7619089.pd
... (30) (un)compromising, condescending, cunning, daring, deserving, discerning, discriminating,... more ... (30) (un)compromising, condescending, cunning, daring, deserving, discerning, discriminating, domineering, forgiving ... The rest could no doubt be handled as a rule-governed derivation via the verbal -ing participle. The problem is, what governs that rule? 4.2. "Manner" ...
INTRODUCTION Any elementary textbook on linguistics will tell us that, strictly speaking, there i... more INTRODUCTION Any elementary textbook on linguistics will tell us that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a synonym. And, by the same token, we may safely assume that there is no such thing as translation. It is by definition impossible, and when it is done, it is the task of the translator to minimise the damage. There are undoubtedly greater challenges in translation than going between two relatively closely related languages like English and Norwegian, and yet, as many of us have found, the more you mingle with close relatives, the more false friends you tend to acquire or discover. That risk you may be willing to take – except when your own life depends on the clarity and correctness of information communicated at all levels of an enormous industrial organisation constructing and operating a gigantic oil platform in the North Sea. To many people at this Conference the name Bergen means – well, perhaps not as many of its inhabitants would like to think, Edvard Grieg and...
KB-N is a web-accessible searchable Knowledge Bank comprising A) a parallel corpus of quality ass... more KB-N is a web-accessible searchable Knowledge Bank comprising A) a parallel corpus of quality assured and calibrated English and Norwegian text drawn from economic-administrative knowledge domains, and B) a domain-focused database representing that knowledge universe in terms of defined concepts and their respective bilingual terminological entries. A central mechanism in connecting A and B is an algorithm for the automatic extraction of term candidates from aligned translation pairs on the basis of linguistic, lexical and statistical filtering (first ever for Norwegian). The system is designed and programmed by Paul Meurer at Aksis (UiB). An important pilot application of the term base is subdomain and collocations based word-sense disambiguation for LOGON, a system for Norwegian-to-English MT currently being developed.
This paper reports early results of a 3-year project at the Department of Professional and Interc... more This paper reports early results of a 3-year project at the Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication, NHH, aiming to establish a knowledge-bank for economic-administrative domains. The underlying assumption is that domain-focal special knowledge is embedded in text produced typically by domain experts for documentary, argumentative, didactic or general communicative purposes. It is further assumed that the essential knowledge content is embedded in relatively language independent concepts and manifested through relatively language specific terminology (in casu English and Norwegian), and that such terminology is stratified with respect to domain specificity ranging from general shared terms down to a small set of domain-focal terms. KB-N represents the culmination of efforts to refine and integrate computational strategies and tools in NLP for corpus design and analysis, automatic and semi-automatic extraction, representation, and retrieval of terminology, dynamic ...
KB-N is a web-accessible searchable Knowledge Bank comprising A) a parallel corpus of quality ass... more KB-N is a web-accessible searchable Knowledge Bank comprising A) a parallel corpus of quality assured and calibrated English and Norwegian text drawn from economic-administrative knowledge domains, and B) a domain-focused database representing that knowledge universe in terms of defined concepts and their respective bilingual terminological entries. A central mechanism in connecting A and B is an algorithm for the automatic extraction of term candidates from aligned translation pairs on the basis of linguistic, lexical and statistical filtering (first ever for Norwegian). The system is designed and programmed by Paul Meurer at Aksis (UiB). An important pilot application of the term base is subdomain and collocations based word-sense disambiguation for LOGON, a system for Norwegian-to-English MT currently being developed. Figure 1: KB-N System architecture
The resource KB-N-basen is a terminological database containing terms, definitions and other conc... more The resource KB-N-basen is a terminological database containing terms, definitions and other conceptual information in Norwegian and English within economics and business administration. The resource was developed in the RCN-funded KBN project (Kunnskapsbank for okonomisk-administrativt domene).
Setting the stage for a fresh look at some Experiencer verbs (like amaze, intrigue, or move, revo... more Setting the stage for a fresh look at some Experiencer verbs (like amaze, intrigue, or move, revolt etc.) the paper begins with an attempt to characterize the current Construction Grammar (CxG) paradigm against a backdrop of well established historical analyses of specificity levels in terms of ‘collocation vs. colligation ’ (Firth) or even ‘etic vs. emic ’ (Pike), and to view the familiar opposition between specific/lexical and schematic/formal expressions from a new vantage point as a continuum rather than a dichotomy. One obvious candidate for a CxG reanalysis is the motley group of verbs loosely referred to as Psychological Predicates, and particularly the fifty or so physical/emotive Experiencer verbs (e.g. revolt) which display a systematic dualism between a literal “physical action ” in-terpretation and a more metaphorical “psychological reaction ” interpretation, each participat-ing in their respective (and distinct) grammatical constructions. The crucial point is how to con...
HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, 2017
This article takes up the important issue of distinguishing popular from professional texts using... more This article takes up the important issue of distinguishing popular from professional texts using economic texts as the object of analysis. It reports on a limited corpus study of authentic texts produced by native English professionals and published for na-tive English readers, but differing in the nature of intended audience (lay/expert). Economics/electronic money transactions constituted the textual domain/subdomain, and the dominant text type was expository. Following a basic quantitative check and a tentative readability ranking the text samples were scrutinized with respect to lexical profile, frequency band penetration, terminological density and uniqueness. A detailed collocation study was then made of focal multi-word terms as well as personal pronouns. Standard corpus techniques were employed in exposing regularities and produ-cing supporting documentation. At the same time possible reflections of communicative situation, pragmatic purpose and semiotic significance were n...
The paper presents early results of a 3-year project to establish an English – Norwegian textand-... more The paper presents early results of a 3-year project to establish an English – Norwegian textand- term database (TERMINEC) representing the special languages of about 30 Economics/Administrative subdomains, sampled from textbooks, research articles and newspaper/journal material. Initial sampled text for each language will be of the order of half a million words, to be expanded by regular monitoring. The English-language textbank is approaching 20% of this volume and already allows pilot testing of available software for text bank operation, term extraction and management. By trawling through a subset of this preliminary test corpus we are able to make a number of observations about the lexical makeup of the three subcorpora. Although the current holdings are far too small to produce representative results, they demonstrate some of the types of lexical-terminological knowledge that can be extracted from raw text through the study of frequency ranking and contamination, lexical weirdness ratios, collocations and multi-word sequences. TERMINEC will thus be able in the future to take on the role of clearinghouse and reference point for professional communication.
FORUM Revue internationale d’interprétation et de traduction / International Journal of Interpretation and Translation, 2004
Le présent article vise à décrire les défis spécifiques de la traduction de textes relevant d’un ... more Le présent article vise à décrire les défis spécifiques de la traduction de textes relevant d’un domaine spécialisé. Après un bref prologue thématisant les limites du traduisible dans le contexte de la traduction philosophique, j’esquisse ma position théorique relative aux langues de spécialité, et présente un modèle général du processus de traduction avant d’entrer dans le vif du sujet, à savoir les domaines de savoir spécialisé et les sous-langages s’y rapportant dont les éléments communicatifs essentiels sont des concepts indépendants d’une langue particulière traduits par des termes spécifiques à chaque langue. Je discute ensuite brièvement quelques exemples qui semblent indiquer que le traducteur, en passant de la terminologie propre à la langue source à celle de la langue cible, dépasse les limites du traduisible. Ces exemples étayent ma conclusion générale selon laquelle la traduction de textes spécialisés pose des défis d’un tout autre ordre que la traduction de textes relev...
Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/157466/1/76... more Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/157466/1/7619089.pd
... (30) (un)compromising, condescending, cunning, daring, deserving, discerning, discriminating,... more ... (30) (un)compromising, condescending, cunning, daring, deserving, discerning, discriminating, domineering, forgiving ... The rest could no doubt be handled as a rule-governed derivation via the verbal -ing participle. The problem is, what governs that rule? 4.2. "Manner" ...
INTRODUCTION Any elementary textbook on linguistics will tell us that, strictly speaking, there i... more INTRODUCTION Any elementary textbook on linguistics will tell us that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a synonym. And, by the same token, we may safely assume that there is no such thing as translation. It is by definition impossible, and when it is done, it is the task of the translator to minimise the damage. There are undoubtedly greater challenges in translation than going between two relatively closely related languages like English and Norwegian, and yet, as many of us have found, the more you mingle with close relatives, the more false friends you tend to acquire or discover. That risk you may be willing to take – except when your own life depends on the clarity and correctness of information communicated at all levels of an enormous industrial organisation constructing and operating a gigantic oil platform in the North Sea. To many people at this Conference the name Bergen means – well, perhaps not as many of its inhabitants would like to think, Edvard Grieg and...
KB-N is a web-accessible searchable Knowledge Bank comprising A) a parallel corpus of quality ass... more KB-N is a web-accessible searchable Knowledge Bank comprising A) a parallel corpus of quality assured and calibrated English and Norwegian text drawn from economic-administrative knowledge domains, and B) a domain-focused database representing that knowledge universe in terms of defined concepts and their respective bilingual terminological entries. A central mechanism in connecting A and B is an algorithm for the automatic extraction of term candidates from aligned translation pairs on the basis of linguistic, lexical and statistical filtering (first ever for Norwegian). The system is designed and programmed by Paul Meurer at Aksis (UiB). An important pilot application of the term base is subdomain and collocations based word-sense disambiguation for LOGON, a system for Norwegian-to-English MT currently being developed.
This paper reports early results of a 3-year project at the Department of Professional and Interc... more This paper reports early results of a 3-year project at the Department of Professional and Intercultural Communication, NHH, aiming to establish a knowledge-bank for economic-administrative domains. The underlying assumption is that domain-focal special knowledge is embedded in text produced typically by domain experts for documentary, argumentative, didactic or general communicative purposes. It is further assumed that the essential knowledge content is embedded in relatively language independent concepts and manifested through relatively language specific terminology (in casu English and Norwegian), and that such terminology is stratified with respect to domain specificity ranging from general shared terms down to a small set of domain-focal terms. KB-N represents the culmination of efforts to refine and integrate computational strategies and tools in NLP for corpus design and analysis, automatic and semi-automatic extraction, representation, and retrieval of terminology, dynamic ...
KB-N is a web-accessible searchable Knowledge Bank comprising A) a parallel corpus of quality ass... more KB-N is a web-accessible searchable Knowledge Bank comprising A) a parallel corpus of quality assured and calibrated English and Norwegian text drawn from economic-administrative knowledge domains, and B) a domain-focused database representing that knowledge universe in terms of defined concepts and their respective bilingual terminological entries. A central mechanism in connecting A and B is an algorithm for the automatic extraction of term candidates from aligned translation pairs on the basis of linguistic, lexical and statistical filtering (first ever for Norwegian). The system is designed and programmed by Paul Meurer at Aksis (UiB). An important pilot application of the term base is subdomain and collocations based word-sense disambiguation for LOGON, a system for Norwegian-to-English MT currently being developed. Figure 1: KB-N System architecture
The resource KB-N-basen is a terminological database containing terms, definitions and other conc... more The resource KB-N-basen is a terminological database containing terms, definitions and other conceptual information in Norwegian and English within economics and business administration. The resource was developed in the RCN-funded KBN project (Kunnskapsbank for okonomisk-administrativt domene).
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Papers by Magnar Brekke