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In:Cross-linguistic Register Variation
Edited by Sylvi Rørvik and Marlén Izquierdo
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 125] 2026
► pp. 140–164

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Chapter 6
Extended attributes in English and German fiction and non-fiction

ORCiD logo with link | Linnaeus University
ORCiD logo with link | Linnaeus University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 20 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.125.06str
Abstract
This study concerns extended attributes, i.e. adjectival or participial premodifiers taking at least one extension such as an adverbial (a very impressive lie; der 1886 geborene Berufssoldat). The comparisons involve English and German fiction from the Oslo Multilingual Corpus and non-fiction from the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus. It is found that such attributes are more frequent in German than in English and in non-fiction than in fiction. In both languages, the most frequent function of the extensions is to express degree, and adverbs are the most common extensions. Nevertheless, German shows more variation regarding both the form and function of the extensions. Apart from token frequencies, there are only small cross-genre differences.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.On extended attributes in English and German
  • 3.Material and method
    • 3.1Corpus material: LEGS and OMC
    • 3.2The four variables
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Frequencies across languages and genres
    • 4.2Adjectives and participles
    • 4.3The number of extensions
    • 4.4The phrasal forms of the extensions
    • 4.5The functions of the extensions
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (29)
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The Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish Corpus (LEGS) (Levin & Ström Herold, 2024), [URL]
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