Professional and intercultural communication

In this article I present an on-going study of the use of web-based corpora to detect Norwegian terminology and in particular financial neologisms. With an ever increasing influence from English in the domain, the use of anglicisms such as ‘dobbeldipp’ (‘double dip’) or ‘shortsalg’ (‘short selling’) is increasing rapidly. The study focuses on how to detect these specialised neologisms and also possible Norwegian terms that are formed. Three different corpora are used, i.e., the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus (NNC), Peter Warrens finansblogg (PW) and a blog on a research project which focuses on the financial crisis called Crisis, restructuring and Growth (KOV). The aim is to gather terminological information which can be useful in the NHH Termbase, an online, web-based termbase to be used by students, lecturers and researchers at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH).

The aim of this contribution is to problematise the way the concepts of revenue and expenditure are used in the domain of accounting without taking into account their different accounting effects depending on whether the accounts are prepared to be used in for instance a limited company, a non-profit organisation, or a municipality, respectively. We suggest an expanded conceptual apparatus to be used than what is the case in present AngloSaxon accounting models which better reflects these effects of revenues and expenditures.

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

Complexity and indeterminacy are to varying degree prominent characteristics of scholarly areas, their concepts and terminology. The article addresses the challenge of how to delineate a scholarly area and how to deal with this vagueness when trying to delineate the area. The scope of LSP has developed greatly since the beginning of the 20th century, from mainly focusing on the terminology of natural science and technology, to also including analyses of scholarly areas belonging to for instance the social sciences, not only with focus on their terminology, but also on textual qualities and discourse features of a given scholary area. The article discusses the fact that social sciences have a higher degree of complexity and indeterminacy than the natural sciences, which is one obvious reason for the increase in LSP contributions in recent years which call for theoretical and methodological adaptations in both LSP research and teaching. The article presents a survey of several such th...

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.

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.

Norges Interne Revisorers Forening (NIRF), a National Institute of the global organisation The Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA Inc.), is a professional organisation in Norway and offers network, information, literature, education, method and techniques within the specialist subjects of internal audit, internal control, risk management and control. When a new important framework on Enterprise Risk Management was available from The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) in 2005, NIRF decided to have it translated into Norwegian.

This article advocates the pursuit of a method for the identification and analysis of metaphors in economic discourse which does not have a cognitive linguistic point of departure. It argues that cognitive linguistics strays too far from the linguistic form in its analysis, that its arguments are circular in nature, and that many of its findings are unverifiable and of limited value to the concerns of applied linguistics. An identification -and property attribution model of metaphor analysis is suggested instead, which should enable the researcher to identify expressions used metaphorically in discourse on a synchronic level, and exclusively extract the properties which are relevant for the interpretation of the metaphorical expressions in context. This model also allows for the distinction between metaphors privative of the economic discourse and metaphors which pervade language in general

This article suggests a new approach to the teaching of the two grammatical constructions
the pasiva refleja and the “se” impersonal in the classrooms of Spanish as a second
language at university level. Concretely, it is argued that both constructions should be
treated as a passive construction, based on an LFG-analysis of them that focuses on
contrastive linguistics. A contrastive approach is recommended also for the instruction of
Spanish as a second language, where meta-linguistic contemplation as well as linguistic
competence is emphasized. Specifically, the use of a linguistic corpus in the classroom is an
integral part of the instruction. The use of a corpus stimulates the student’s curiosity; it
exposes him/her to authentic linguistic material, and promotes independent, inductive
reasoning.

The articles in this volume were written to mark the tenth anniversary of the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen. Since its formation as a new administrative unit in 2007, the department has provided the institutional framework for teaching and research conducted in nine different languages, as well as within (and often across) four different disciplines. The articles we present in this collection reflect some of that diversity, bringing together the perspectives of researchers in English, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish literature, linguistics, cultural studies, and didactics in an enquiry centred on the topical issue of "relevance."

This article suggests a new approach to the teaching of the two grammatical constructions the pasiva refleja and the “se” impersonal in the classrooms of Spanish as a second language at university level. Concretely, it is argued that both constructions should be treated as a passive construction, based on an LFG-analysis of them that focuses on contrastive linguistics. A contrastive approach is recommended also for the instruction of Spanish as a second language, where meta-linguistic contemplation as well as linguistic competence is emphasized. Specifically, the use of a linguistic corpus in the classroom is an integral part of the instruction. The use of a corpus stimulates the student’s curiosity; it exposes him/her to authentic linguistic material, and promotes independent, inductive reasoning.