FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

“shit happens”, my favourite phraseological borrowing from English, used in several languages; e.g. it has been in Norwegian for some decades, and its meaning works at several levels.

Gisle Andersen is Professor of English linguistics at NHH Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway. Andersen’s research focuses on the use of corpora for studies in pragmatics and sociolinguistics, covering topics such as language contact, discourse markers and politeness. His publications include Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation (2001), Trends in Teenage Talk (with A-B Stenström and I.K. Hasund, 2002), Exploring Newspaper Language (ed., 2012), Pragmatics of Society (ed. with Karin Aijmer, 2012) and English corpus linguistics: Variation in Time, Space and Genre (ed. with Kristin Bech, 2013). His recent work has focused on pragmatic borrowing, an approach to language contact which investigates how the use of borrowed items is constrained by cultural, social and cognitive factors, and how items that are inherently pragmatic in nature are borrowed across languages.