Binomial adverbs in Germanic and Romance Languages
Johannes Graën, Martin Volk · Benjamins translation library · 2021
Abstract As a special type of multiword expressions, binomials are a frequent phenomenon in many languages. We focus on binomial adverbs that are coordinations of two adverbial constituents. Their syntactic contribution to a sentence is adverbial as well and their semantic contribution is idiomatic. They have many uses, such as to intensify ( first and foremost ), express tendency ( more and more ), frequency ( over and over [again] ), vagueness ( more or less ), determination ( sooner or later ) etc. In this work, we describe our approaches to identify binomial adverbs in a large multiparallel corpus. Alongside the well-known measure of reversibility, we also calculate measures of statistical association and look for single-word translation equivalents in other languages. Combining these features facilitates the identification of binomial adverbs.