Such and sådan – the same but different

English such has a variety of uses, which nearly always involve the expression of similarity, and such can therefore be called a ʻsimilativeʼ. Swedish sådan has very similar uses. However, the two similatives differ strongly with respect to the frequency of some of these uses. Thus such, different from sådan, rarely functions as a noun or pronoun, compared to sådan it more frequently exhibits the so-called ʻintensifying useʼ and it has more competition from constructions with like, sort and kind (sort, typ in Swedish). The study uses three methods: (i) non-corpus analysis based on intuition, scrutiny of existing scholarship and google searches, (ii) analyis of comparable corpora, and (iii) analysis of parallel corpora.


Introduction
This paper aims to describe the similarities and the differences between English such and Swedish sådan and it does so using three different methodologies.The first is that of language-specific scholarship, relying on intuition, previous scholarship and web searches.This method gives us a good analysis of the possible uses of such and sådan and it tells us that these uses are very similar.The second method uses two languagespecific corpora, and it shows which uses are more or less frequent and it tells us that such and sådan are very different.The third method uses parallel corpora and it discloses what other means the two languages have at their disposal to express such and sådan.The paper aims to advance the contrastive analysis of such and sådan and, at a more general level, it is a plea for methodological triangulation.

Such and sådan are rather similar
The English word such has attracted quite a bit of attention in recent years, in part because it has a great diversity of uses.Some of them are illustrated below.In (1) to (6) we focus on the categorial status of such and on word order; in (7) to (9) on meaning.Most examples are easily googlable quotes from famous people.Only for (7) and (9) do we give the URL. (1) Why was I born with such contemporaries?(O.Wilde) (2) An American has no sense of privacy … There is no such thing in the country.(G.B.Shaw) (3) If sex is such a natural thing, how come there are so many books on how to? (B.Midler) (4) There is no such thing as a non-political speech by a politician.(R. Nixon) ( 5) Before my term has ended, we shall have to test anew whether a nation such as ours can endure.(J.F. Kennedy) (6) Do not seek pleasure as such.(A.Lawrence Lowell) (7) We wanted to identify the communities with the best such opportunities in Mississippi.(http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/reviews/best-towns-mississippi-young-families/, June 3 2015) (8) I had such a great time with the audience.(Lady Gaga) (9) If you say "so-and-so is vice president, finance, of such and such,ˮ should there be a comma after "financeˮ?(http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Commas/faq0003.html,June 23 2015) In (1) such could be an adjective or a determiner.In (2), however, such would seem to follow a determiner, so it can only be an adjective, but then in (3) such precedes a determiner and it cannot therefore qualify as either a determiner or an adjective.In (4) such is connected with as, but there is a noun in between such and as and this fact invites an analysis as a discontinuous construction.Yet in (5) such joins as in the postnominal domain.(6) shows another peculiarity: instead of such (…) as, it has as such.And if the examples (1) tot (5) give reason to think that such is indefinite, (7) shows that such has a definite use as well.In (8) the adnominal such has an ʻintensifyingʼ function (with such a great being equivalent to a very great) rather than an ʻidentifyingʼ use -terminology due to Bolinger (1972).The strangest use of all is perhaps such and such in (9), which is non-compositional, i.e., it does not first refer to one type of thing and then to another.The diversity of uses has bewildered linguists.Referring to the research literature Wood (2002: 91) writes that "[t]he word such causes confusion and disagreement, and stipulations about its category often vacillate between hedges and contradictionsˮ and fifteen years later van der Auwera & Sahoo (2015) argue that it is best to treat such as a category all by itself, a one-member category, which they call ʻsimilativeʼ, related, of course, to the determiner, the demonstrative and the adjective, but different from all.
The problem of categorizing such reappears with the translational equivalents in other languages, esp.Germanic ones: see e.g.Jensen (2013) on Danish, Fretheim (2010) on Norwegian, Demske (2005) on German, van der Auwera & Sahoo (2015) on Dutch, and Leu (2015: 161-165) on Germanic in general.For the Swedish similative sådan 1 there is Ekberg (2011a, b), who has pointed out that though sådan is normally preceded by the indefinite article en or ett, Malmö adolescents often leave out the indefinite article, in which case it does not have its normal meaning, translatable with ʻsuchʼ, but rather what has been called a ʻrecognitionalʼ use (Himmelmann 1996) Ekberg (2011a, b) also points out that, since the discourse referent of a recognitional uses is new, sådan comes close to doing the job of the indefinite article.The English similative does not have this use, only the demonstrative (notice this as a translation of sådan in (10)). 2 Another difference between Swedish and English is that with a full form, the one combining the similative and the indefinite article, English has the similative first (such a), but Swedish the indefinite article (en sådan).So such and sådan are clearly different.Yet looking back at the illustrations for English, Swedish has counterparts for all of them, except for the postnominal such as use illustrated in (5) with a nation such as ours, 1 In the text we will refer to ʻsådanʼ, but it has six forms, all of the indefinite adjectival type, viz.sådan, sådant, sådana and their short forms sån, sånt, såna. 2 Interestingly, the Dutch cognate to such, viz.zulk, does not allow a recognitional use either, but Dutch zulk is currently being replaced by the new similative zo'n (literally 'so a') and zo'n does have it (Van Olmen & van der Auwera 2014, Van Olmen 2015).
where Swedish either puts the similative in front of the noun or drops it altogether.
( Neither the Svenska Akademiens Grammatik (SAG) nor the Svenska Akademiens Ordbok (SAOB) mentions this use.Sådan also has the ʻnoun as suchʼ construction and the definite use (both listed in SAOB but not in SAG3 ). ( 14) to ( 16) illustrate these uses.( 14 Interestingly, in (15) sådan takes the ʻnormalʼ indefinite inflection, but this is not quite felicitous, for the noun phrase is definite, and in ( 16) sådan takes the definite inflection, which it is not supposed to have (SAG II,441).Sådan also allows the intensifying use, recognized in both SAG and SAOB and illustrated in (17).

Such and sådan are rather different
Even if such and sådan have very similar or identical uses, they do not avail themselves of these uses with the same frequency.The frequencies differ, both the overall frequency and the frequency for each use.We investigated the frequencies found in the original fiction parts of the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) (Altenberg et al. 2001).This corpus has the advantage of containing both original texts andtranslations, which will prove insightful in section 4. The figures do not, of course, give us a full picture, but it is at least a good start.The results for the overall frequencies are shown in Table 1.We thus see that Swedish sådan is more frequent than English such and this difference is statistically significant (χ 2 = 18.771, df = 1, p < 0.0001).
The next question is whether this higher frequency is distributed over all its uses or rather due to just a few.The main uses of both such and sådan are the adnominal uses, viz.uses (1) to ( 5) and ( 7), but not (6) and (9).For English the adnominal uses make up 89% of all uses, for Swedish quite a bit less, viz.57%.The frequencies of all adnominal uses are shown in Table 2.We see that the normalized numbers are very close and the difference is not, of course, statistically significant (χ 2 = 0.008, df = 1, p = 0.93).This means that the higher frequency of sådan will be due to one or more of the non-adnominal uses.The uses in question are the nominal and pronominal uses.
(  20) and ( 21) to be nominal.The exact categorization is not relevant here and we will just refer to these uses as ʻ(pro)nominalʼ ones.What is relevant is that English cannot translate sådan in ( 18) to ( 21 (Pro)nominal such does exist though.The such in the such and such construction of ( 9) is arguably a case in point.And here are a few more types.
(26) But some/many such have yet to be reported.( 27) But such have yet to be reported.(28) There you can buy bags, wallets, and such.
The next question is how frequent (pro)nominal such and sådan are.It turns out that (pro)nominal such is very infrequent: in the original fiction subcorpus of English, there is only one attestation of (pro)nominal such, viz. the one shown in (29).( 29 The Dutch adjectives are more like the Swedish ones, but the similatives are more like the English ones. The prominence of (pro)nominal uses is no doubt the biggest difference between such and sådan.But there are more.In what follows we will focus on the difference between identifying vs. intensifying uses.As pointed out already, English and Swedish allow both uses.( 33 (SAG II,445) Of course, in some contexts it is not clear which reading is meant.Thus (37) is an example that can only be disambiguated in context, as is shown by Ghesquière & Van de Velde (2011: 786) the pressure could be of a certain type or of a high intensity.Swedish ( 38) is also vague.
(37) There should be no need for such pressure.In the English subcorpus the distribution of identifying vs. intensifying uses vs. those that are vague between the two is shown in Table 3.When we come to Swedish, the facts are more complicated, for Swedish sådan also has the recognitional use, already mentioned for the speech of Malmö adolescent studied by Ekberg (2011a, b), but in our view it is not restricted to this register.( 39) is anexample from the ESPC.The distribution of identifying, intensifying, vague and recognitional uses of sådan is shown in Table 4.We see that sådan intensifies less than such (15 % vs. 28 %) and that it sådan identifies more (74% vs. 66 %).Furthermore, for the full picture we should also include the (pro)nominal uses in Swedish, which is particularly interesting, because the (pro)nominal uses are all identifying.Table 5 tabulates the identifying uses for (ad/pro)nominal sådan.The new figures are those in the last row and the conclusion is clear: sådan is more identifying than such.The next section will make clear why this is so.

Alternatives for such and sådan
If sådan is more dedicated to identification than to intensification, one wonders what other means Swedish has for intensification, more particularly, for exactly that type that sådan can express, but does less often than such.Here the translations in the Swedish-English Parallel Corpus come in handy.Let us have a look at the translational equivalents of adnominal intensifying such in Swedish.When English combines intensifying such with a noun and without an adjective, in 3 out of 18 cases, Swedish chooses to intensify an adjective that approximates the meaning of the English noun, and then the intensification happens with så, not with sådan, as in ( 40).In the majority of the cases, however, Swedish too uses an intensifying sådan.However, when English combines the intensifying such with both a noun and an adjective, Swedish uses the intensifying sådan only in 5 out of the 25 cases, as illustrated in ( 41).
( The Swedish alternative makes good sense: when the person seen in ( 42) is a very beautiful woman, this is because she scores high on a scale from less to more beautiful, not on a scale from less of a woman to more of a woman.We can now also explain the puzzle left at the end of the preceding section.Sådan is less intensifying than such, because when the noun phrase has an adjective, Swedish typically intensifies with så.Though this strategy is available in English too, it seems to be relatively infrequent: in our corpus it did not occur at all.( 44) is a made-up example. 5 (44) Heʼd never seen so beautiful a woman up close, in the flesh.
We have also seen that sådan is more (pro)nominal than such.Table 7 shows how English translates (pro)nominal sådan.Some translations use such and they are all adnominal (see ( 45) and ( 46)).
5 An anonymous reviewer checked the relative frequency of the such a + adjective + noun and so + adjective + a + noun strategies in the BNC, and found the first one to be ten times as frequent as the second one.
( The like/sort/kind strategies are no less prominent for the translation of adnominal such (see ( 52) to ( 54)).The other way round, Swedish has a sort/typ strategy too, but it cannot match the sådan stragegy.We can thus say that that similative such has more competition from other similative markers than Swedish sådan.

Conclusion
This paper is a demonstration of a three-pronged analysis of the differences and similarities between English such and Swedish sådan.
Methodologically, we engaged in scholarship the way it is done outside the field of corpus linguistics, by essentially relying on intuition, by comparing -and criticizing -the existing language-specific analyses of such and sådan, and, in this day and age, web googling.We then added strictly corpus-based accounts of such and sådan, studying their uses both in original texts and in translatons.This triangulation allowed us to make clear that the possible uses of such and sådan are very similar, but their actual uses much less so.They both express similarity and we have called them ʻsimilativeʼ, but English such is nearly only used adnominally, whereas Swedish sådan has prominent (pro)nominal uses as well.
Another striking difference is that both have identifying and intensifying uses, the latter is more prominent for such than for sådan, and when the noun phrase contains an adjective, Swedish prefers to intensify with så rather than with sådan.Also, only in Swedish do we find the recognitional use.Finally, we have seen that to express similarity such has more competition from like/sort/kind strategies than sådan from sort/typ strategies.Concluding the conclusion: the such and sådan similatives are neither the same nor different: they are … similar.
) with such.(22) *One should have had a such when one was a boy.(23) *Why should we bring in heavy rag rugs when there are good such in plastic?(24) *Such as nobody could have come up with.(25) *It is disgusting of you to say something such.
before seen such a chasm in a pair of eyes.(BL1T) of these typical frail old voices.(MG1T)

Table 1 .
Overall frequencies of such and sådan (original English and Swedish texts

Table 2 .
Overall frequencies of adnominal uses of such and sådan (original English and English adnominals do not normally ʻgo nominalʼ: they remain adnominal and use the prop word one, as in green ones.Swedish adnominals go nominal without a prop word, as in bra såna (in (19)) or gröna in (30), referring, for example, to green apples.
)[…]Plato was embraced and absorbed and Aristotle was rediscovered and acclaimed "the Philosopherˮ by such as Aquinas.(JH1)Swedish sådan is very different: in the Swedish subcorpus (pro)nominal sådan uses account for no less than 38 % of all uses.It will be remembered that 57 % of all sådan uses are adnominal, this leaves us with 43 % non-adnominal uses, and thus nearly all are (pro)nominal.The strong contrast between (pro)nominal such and sådan makes sense.

Table 3 .
Identifying, intensifying and vague uses of adnominal such (original English texts ESPC)

Table 6 .
Intensifying adnominal such translated into Swedish (Swedish translated texts

Table 7 .
Identifying (pro)nominal sådan translated into English (English translated texts ESPC) (51)we illustrate a type where the notion of similarity is not expressed by such but by like, sort of or kind of.Like goes with a noun and sort and kind are nouns, at least, to some extent (though with sorta and kinda we see these constructions acquiring an adnominal status).