The complex case of constrained communication. A corpus-driven, multilingual and multi‑register search for the common ground between non‑native and translated language

In this study we explore the common ground between second language and translated language as instances of constrained language use. Our research design involves three languages (English, Finnish, Italian), two constraining languages and two different registers in each of the three languages. These are compared in terms of frequency of syntactic structures (POS bigrams), adopting a corpus-driven method combining keyness analysis and Multi-Dimensional Analysis. No general constrainedness effects were observed which apply irrespective of languages and registers, but our results point to the centrality of the opposition between verbal and nominal orientation for distinguishing constrained from unconstrained varieties. We conclude with suggestions on how our method and findings could lead to a deeper understanding of constrained language use.