Tense, Modality and Polarity: The Finite Verbal Group in English and German Newsgroup Texts

This paper describes work in progress on a corpus-based study, comparing seemingly similar registers in two languages: English and German newsgroup texts, collected in the Bremen Translation Corpus. Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG, Halliday 1994 [1985]) provides a theoretical framework for categorizing empirical findings. I will focus on three systems of the finite verbal group, i.e. tense, modality and polarity, to describe these registers on the textual and the interpersonal metafunction levels. The use of tense, apart from its logical function, can also reflect the textual metafunction, since different tenses are preferred in spoken and written discourse (see Biber et al. 1999 or Duden 2005). Do newsgroup text authors favour one tense over the other? And is tense choice the same in both languages? On the interpersonal metafunction level, I analyse the form and function of modal auxiliaries, and look at how modal auxiliaries combine with process types. I then investigate the position of the syntactic negation markers in English and German clauses. My aim is to provide a thorough description of the realization of finite verbal groups in English and German newsgroup texts as a preliminary step towards research on variation in parallel translations using the Bremen Translation Corpus.