Gard Jenset

• PhD
• Principal data scientist at Independent Researcher

This is a comprehensive guidebook to the quantitative methods needed for Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS). It provides a systematic description of the various statistical tests used in Corpus Linguistics which can be used in translation research. In Part 1, Theoretical Explorations, the interplay between quantitative and qualitative methodol...

The semantics of existential there is discussed in a diachronic, corpus-based perspective. While previous studies of there have been qualitative or relied on interpreting relative frequencies directly, the present study combines multivariate statistical techniques with linguistic theory through distributional semantics. It is argued that existentia...

Historical linguistics is the study of language change and stability, of the history of individual languages, and of the relatedness between languages. In spite of numerous acknowledgements, the adoption of quantitative methods in historical linguistics is still far from being mainstream and it falls below the level of other branches of linguistics...

Multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary collaboration can be an appropriate response to tackling the increasingly complex problems faced by today’s society. Scientific disciplines are not rigidly defined entities and their profiles change over time. No previous study has investigated multiple disciplinarity (i.e. the complex interaction between d...

This paper investigates a set of 15 Icelandic verbs licensing both a nominative and a dative argument, recently analysed in the literature, comparing them with a corresponding set of 15 German verbs. The Icelandic dataset consists of verbs selecting for three different argument structures: (a) ordinary Nom-Dat verbs, (b) non-alternating Dat-Nom ver...

It is broadly admitted that social contexts of reasoning may prompt children and adolescents to improve the quality of their reasoning. However, it is not clear how this quality may be assessed when it comes to arguments expressed within oral interactions in diverse settings (whole-class or small-group discussions) by students of different ages and...

In this paper we compare a set of 15 Icelandic verbs licensing both a nominative and a dative argument, first investigated by Somers & Barðdal (2022) and Somers, Jenset & Barðdal (2024), with a corresponding set of 15 German verbs. The Icelandic dataset consists of verbs selecting for three different argument structures: a) ordinary Nom-Dat verbs,...

Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verbs in Icelandic are notorious for instantiating two diametrically opposed argument structures: the Dat-Nom and the Nom-Dat construction. We conduct a systematic study of the relevant verbs to uncover the factors steering the alternation. This involves a comparison of 15 verbs, five alternating ones, and as a control,...

Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verbs in Icelandic are notorious for instantiating two diametrically opposed argument structures: the Dat-Nom and the Nom-Dat construction. We conduct a systematic study of the relevant verbs to uncover the factors steering the alternation. This involves a comparison of 15 verbs, five alternating ones, and as a control,...

In Middle English (c.1150-1450 CE), two existential constructions were in competition: one with there as a formal subject and one without there, the latter being the historically older of the two (Jenset and McGillivray 2017, 166–87). The two variants are exemplified, in (1) and (2) respectively, below from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: (1) With hym...

Constructions have long been argued to hold a central role in accounts of language (Fillmore, Kay, and O’connor 1988; Goldberg 1995), and construction-based approaches to historical linguistics are well established (Bardal et al. 2015; Hilpert 2013; Bardal et al. 2012). However, identifying constructions automatically in corpora can be methodologic...

Open-ended survey data constitute an important basis in research as well as for making business decisions. Collecting and manually analysing free-text survey data is generally more costly than collecting and analysing survey data consisting of answers to multiple-choice questions. Yet free-text data allow for new content to be expressed beyond pred...

The dataset covers the so-called “dative alternation”. The dative alternation (also referred to as the ditransitive or double-object construction) refers to parallel constructions that have broadly similar meaning but different syntax: i. he gave it to the board” ii. “I gave her my old one” In i., the verb “give” takes a noun phrase (the pronoun...

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems are essential components in many industry conversational Artificial Intelligence applications. There are strong incentives to develop a good NLU capability in such systems, both to improve the user experience, and in the case of regulated industries for compliance reasons. We report on a series of experi...

Open-ended survey data constitute an important basis in research as well as for making business decisions. Collecting and manually analysing free-text survey data is generally more costly than collecting and analysing survey data consisting of answers to multiple-choice questions. Yet free-text data allow for new content to be expressed beyond pred...

A well-known feature of English grammar is the dative alternation, whereby a verb may be used in a V-NP-NP construction (Give me the money) or with a prepositional phrase in the pattern V-NP-PP, typically with the preposition to (Give the money to me). In this study, we use data from the Early-Access Subset (EAS) of the Spoken British National Corp...

This book is an innovative guide to quantitative, corpus-based research in historical and diachronic linguistics. Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray argue that, although historical linguistics has been successful in using the comparative method, the field lags behind other branches of linguistics with respect to adopting quantitative methods. H...

One of the functions of the dative is to mark non-prototypical subjects, i. e. subjects that somehow deviate from the agentive prototype. The Germanic languages, as all subbranches of Indo-European (cf. Barðdal et al. 2012. Reconstructing constructional semantics: The dative subject construction in Old Norse‐Icelandic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Rus...

Hands-on exploration of linguistic data with R. This one-day session was held as part of the From Text to Tech workshop (http://dhoxss.humanities.ox.ac.uk/2015/text2tech.html). Please feel free to use this resource in your own teaching. If you do, I'd appreciate an email or a personal message on RG just because I'm curious where and to whom the ma...

Please feel free to use the accompanying R code resource in your own teaching. If you do, I'd appreciate an email or a personal message on RG just because I'm curious where and to whom the material might be of use.

Hamlet characters: number of spoken lines and vocabulary. Based on word frequencies from the Bodleian First Folio version of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Cognitive linguistics has an honourable tradition of paying respect to naturally occurring language data and there have been fruitful interactions between corpus data and aspects of linguistic structure and meaning. More recently, dialect data and sociolinguistic data collection methods/theoretical concepts have started to generate interest. There...

The present article considers the evolution of existential there in Old English, with a focus on the mechanisms underlying the propagation of the change once the initial innovation had taken place. Drawing on the modeling approach taken by Blythe and Croft (2012), it is argued that social and structural factors colluded in the early stage propagati...

Using unsupervised clustering techniques this study explores sentence alignment patterns in a parallel corpus of Norwegian source texts and Spanish translations, the NSPC (Hareide and Hofland 2012). The results show that three strategies with respect to sentence alignment dominate: one to one correspondence, merging two sentences into one, and remo...

We propose a new measure of constructional saliency for use with Web-data, which corrects for infrequent forms. The measure attempts to incorporate both collocational information as well as frequency of use for the whole construction. We report on results for a case study of the so-called dative alternation in English, and show that our measure of...

As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items, like words and morphemes, and has not been conducted for larger and more complex linguistic units, which intuitively seems to be a more intricate task, especi...

Analyzing English Grammar: Exercises for Advanced Students offers a wealth of exercises aimed at Norwegian university and college students of English. Packed with authentic material drawn from corpora, the Web, newspapers and magazines, it covers the main topics taught in undergraduate grammar courses and provides realistic exercises adapted for th...

The present study investigates attitudes among student teachers toward using electronic resources in teaching. Two groups of student teachers, one composed of students in their first semester and the other composed of students in their third or fourth year, were asked to assess their skills and attitudes, before being shown an example of how open-s...

The expertise approach (Ericsson 2008) has been used to explore the competence of translators and interpreters since the mid-1990s, and is now a well established sub-field in translation and interpreting process research (Jääskeläinen 2010). In the area of interpreting, Ivanova (1999), Liu (2001) and others have explored the expertise approach. The...

My doctoral project is an empirical study of English presentational constructions, particularly the so-called existential-“there” construction. By gathering and analyzing data from Old English and onwards until Present English, I intend to present a coherent view of how this much-disputed construction has evolved, and, through the application of co...

“Grammaticalization” has been a very productive tool in cognitive and functionalist linguistic research for quite some time. However, it has been criticized for, among other things, lacking explanatory power. The resent paper takes as its starting point the critical observation in Campbell (2001) that while inadequate as an explanation, grammatical...

Unpublished MS written as course material for a methods in linguistics seminar taught at the University of Bergen in 2008.

Unpublished MS written as course material for a methods in linguistics seminar taught at the University of Bergen in 2008.