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In:Cross-linguistic Register Variation
Edited by Sylvi Rørvik and Marlén Izquierdo
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 125] 2026
► pp. 113–139

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Chapter 5
Verb omission in translations as evidence of grammaticalisation in progress

ORCiD logo with link | University of Inland Norway
Published online: 20 February 2026
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.125.05ega
Abstract
This chapter investigates the hypothesis that the omission of the lexical sense of the first verb in translations of a two-verb construction may indicate that the construction in question is undergoing grammaticalisation in the original language. The constructions investigated contain the English verbs fail and help and the Norwegian verbs sitte (‘sit’) and stå (‘stand’). The data for the study come from the bidirectional English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus. The results for all of the constructions lend support to the contention that the first verbs in the two-verb constructions have been semantically bleached to such an extent that they may be said to be grammaticalising.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Previous studies
    • 3.1Studies based on monolingual data
    • 3.2Studies based on contrastive data
  • 4.Corpus, theory, and method
    • 4.1Corpus
    • 4.2Theory
    • 4.3Method
  • 5.Results of the study
    • 5.1The fail and help constructions
    • 5.2The Norwegian constructions
  • 6.Discussion of results
  • 7.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (41)
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