Contrastive studies have experienced a dramatic revival in the last decades. By combining the methodological advantages of computer corpus linguistics and the possibility of contrasting texts in two or more languages, the structure and use of languages can be explored with greater accuracy, detail and empirical strength than before. The approach has also proved to have fruitful practical applications in a number of areas such as language teaching, lexicography, translation studies and computer-aided translation. This volume contains twelve studies comparing linguistic phenomena in English and seven other languages. The topics range from comparisons of specific lexical categories and word combinations to syntactic constructions and discourse phenomena such as cohesion and thematic structure. The studies highlight similarities and differences in the use, semantics and functions of the compared items, as well as the emergence of new meanings and language change. The emphasis varies from purely linguistic studies to those focusing on practical applications.

Marking 30 years of contrastive corpus linguistics, this volume provides a state-of-the-art of the field, charting its development over time and expanding the boundaries of the discipline. Focusing on a diversity of methods and approaches to language comparison, it uses both comparable and translation corpora, and explores a broad range of language registers from newspaper reporting and spoken political discourse to film scripts and football match reports. Using English as the pivot language for each chapter, the volume offers contrastive bilingual and trilingual perspectives on a number of languages, including Czech, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, covering a typologically diverse field. By exploring the application of complex multi-genre multilingual data sets and expanding the horizons of contrastive studies, it demonstrates how a juxtaposition of cross-linguistic and register variation can deepen our insight into language variation and use. The volume is dedicated to two prominent contrastive corpus linguists: Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, who have decisively shaped the discipline from its very beginnings. The book opens with a chapter by Aijmer, reflecting on the current breadth and future prospects of research in the area while pointing to emergent trends with an insight that only she can offer.

Corpus Linguistics for Translation and Contrastive Studies provides a clear and practical introduction to using corpora in these fields. Giving special attention to parallel corpora, which are collections of texts in two or more languages, and demonstrating the potential benefits for multilingual corpus linguistics research to both translators and researchers, this book: explores the different types of parallel corpora available, and shows how to use basic and advanced search procedures to analyse them; explains how to compile a parallel corpus, and discusses their uses for translation purposes and to research linguistic phenomena across languages; demonstrates the use of corpus extracts across a wide range of texts, including dictionaries, novels by authors including Jane Austen and Mikhail Bulgakov, and newspapers such as The Sunday Times; is illustrated with case studies from a range of languages including Finnish, Russian, English and French. Written by two experienced researchers and practitioners, Corpus Linguistics for Translation and Contrastive Studies is essential reading for postgraduate students and researchers working within the area of translation and contrastive studies.

Rapid advances in computing have enabled the integration of corpora into language teaching and learning, yet in China corpus methods have not yet been widely adopted. Corpus Linguistics in Chinese Contexts aims to advance the state of the art in the use of corpora in applied linguistics and contribute to the expertise in corpus use in China.

This volume represents the first book-length corpus-based contrastive studies of major grammatical categories in English and Chinese, two most important yet distinctly different world languages in the 21st century, on the basis of large matching corpora of authentic spoken and written data in the two languages.

In vielen Bereichen der Linguistik werden Textkorpora, Sprachkorpora oder multimodale Korpora heute als empirische Basis verwendet. Aufbauend auf Methoden des 19. Jahrhunderts haben sich dabei mit dem Aufkommen von elektronischen Korpora seit den 1940ern neue Standards für linguistische Annotation und Vorverarbeitung sowie für qualitative und quantitative Untersuchungen entwickelt. Das Handbuch bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über Geschichte, Methoden und Anwendungen der Korpuslinguistik. Die einzelnen Überblicks- und Spezialartikel sind von Experten und Expertinnen der jeweiligen Gebiete geschrieben. Dabei wird auf klare und umfassende Darstellung, eine gute Vernetzung zwischen den Artikel und weiterführende Hinweise Wert gelegt.

With an ever-growing body of corpus linguistic tools, resources and applications, it becomes increasingly important to reflect critically on the underlying assumptions that corpus linguistics is based on. Focusing on meaning and methods, this book tackles fundamental concepts and approaches that define the discourse of the field. Internationally renowned contributors address topics that range from the history of corpus linguistics to contrastive perspectives between languages, to interpreting patterns in corpora as evidence of both mainstream discourses and individual voices within them. This collection not only adds to our understanding of the fundamentals of corpus linguistics, it also brings innovative meanings to the corpus linguistics discourse. It has been edited in honour of Wolfgang Teubert, who for decades has been a significant voice in this discourse.

This volume will be of particular interest to readers interested in expanding the applications of corpus linguistics techniques through new tools and approaches. The text includes selected papers from the Fifth North American Symposium, hosted by the Linguistics Department at Montclair State University in Montclair New Jersey in May 2004. The symposium papers represented several areas of corpus studies including language development, syntactic analysis, pragmatics and discourse, language change, register variation, corpus creation and annotation, and practical applications of corpus work, primarily in language teaching, but also in medical training and machine translation. A common thread through most of the papers was the use of corpora to study domains longer than the word. Not surprisingly, fully half of the papers deal with the computational tools and linguistic strategies needed to search for and analyze these longer spans of language while most of the remaining papers examine particular syntactic and rhetorical properties of one or more corpora.

Corpus Linguistics has quickly established itself as the leading undergraduate course book in the subject. This second edition takes full account of the latest developments in the rapidly changing field, making this the most up-to-date and comprehensive textbook available. It gives a step-by-step introduction to what a corpus is, how corpora are constructed, and what can be done with them. Each chapter ends with a section of study questions that contain practical corpus-based exercises.* Designed for student use, with all technical terms explained in the text and referenced further in a Glossary* Examples are taken from existing corpora; detailed case study chapter included* Contains end-of-chapter summaries, study questions and suggestions for further reading* Updated reviews of new studies, areas that have recently come to prominence and new directions in corpus encoding and annotation standards* Detailed coverage of multilingual corpus construction and use* An in-depth historical review of computer-based corpora from the 1940s to the present day* Helpful appendices include answers to the study questions, up-to-date information on where corpora can be found, and the latest software for corpus research."e;[An] important addition to the fast growing literature in corpus linguistics... should be read by anyone interested in utilization of large-scale corpora in linguistic research."e; Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, on the first edition

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics provides a timely overview of a dynamic and rapidly growing area with a widely applied methodology. Through the electronic analysis of large bodies of text, corpus linguistics demonstrates and supports linguistic statements and assumptions. In recent years it has seen an ever-widening application in a variety of fields: computational linguistics, discourse analysis, forensic linguistics, pragmatics and translation studies. Bringing together experts in the key areas of development and change, the handbook is structured around six themes which take the reader through building and designing a corpus to using a corpus to study literature and translation. A comprehensive introduction covers the historical development of the field and its growing influence and application in other areas. Structured around five headings for ease of reference, each contribution includes further reading sections with three to five key texts highlighted and annotated to facilitate further exploration of the topics. The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics is the ideal resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates.