Three Times [Not] the Same: Linguistic Perspectivation in German, Norwegian and English

Languages, even when closely related in structure and history, such as German, Norwegian, and English, often differ in salient ways when encoding the same content. This is partly due to certain normative traditions, but more importantly to parametric variation in the structural potential of these languages. This paper reports results from a large project on language contrasts (SPRIK, University of Oslo). It examines 13 typological contrasts between German, English and Norwegian, such as existence of a progressive or subjunctive, verb position, richness of prenominal adjuncts, and others. Some of these are absolute, most however are gradual. It is then shown how these contrasts influence and sometimes determine the particular form of translations across the three languages: in their entirety, they lead to a language-specific perspectivation of the content to be expressed. References. Adapted from the source document