Contrastive Linguistics, like other linguistic disciplines, is becoming more and more data-oriented, relying increasingly on the statistical analysis of corpus data to reveal and investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between languages. This title illustrates this trend with a representative sample of contrastive linguistic case studies.

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.

Contrastive Linguistics, like other linguistic disciplines, is becoming more and more data-oriented, relying increasingly on the statistical analysis of corpus data to reveal and investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between languages. The volume Corpus Studies in Contrastive Linguistics illustrates this current trend with a representative sample of contrastive linguistic case studies. These cover a range of linguistic phenomena (syntax, modality and discourse) and pursue different types of research questions (grammaticalization, pragmatic function, stylistic function, typological profile). Accordingly, they use different types of corpora: contemporary and historical texts, written and spoken discourse, and various text types, such as academic discourse and political discourse. Five different languages are represented (English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Lithuanian) with English as a language of comparison in each contribution. The studies all show that quantitative analyses are not at odds with insightful qualitative interpretations or functional approaches to language, but rather complement each other. This volume was orginally published as a special issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15:2 (2010).

Corpus-based Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies presents readers with up-to-date research in corpus-based contrastive linguistics and translation studies, showing the high degree of complementarity between the two fields in terms of research methodology, interests and objectives. Offering theoretical, descriptive and applied perspectives, the articles show how translation and contrastive approaches to grammar, lexis and discourse can be harmoniously combined through the use of monolingual, bilingual and multilingual corpora and how contrastive information needs to inform translation research and vice versa. The notion of contrastive linguistics adopted here is broad; thus, alongside comparisons of Malay/English idioms and the French imparfait and its English equivalents, there are articles comparing different varieties of French, and sign language with spoken language. This collection should be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics and translation studies. In addition, the section on corpus-based teaching applications will be of great value to teachers of translation and contrastive linguistics.

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.

This volume will give readers insight into how genres are characterised by the patterns of frequency and distribution of linguistic features across a number of European languages. The material presented in this book will also stimulate further corpus-based contrastive research including more languages, more genres and different types of corpora. This is the first special issue of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, a publication that addresses the interface between the two disciplines and offers a platform to scholars who combine both methodologies to present rigorous and interdisciplinary findings about language in real use. Corpus linguistics and Pragmatics have traditionally represented two paths of scientific thought, parallel but often mutually exclusive and excluding. Corpus Linguistics can offer a meticulous methodology based on mathematics and statistics, while Pragmatics is characterized by its effort in the interpretation of intended meaning in real language.

This book is organized in three sections. The three articles in Section one introduce the disciplines of Contrastive Linguistics (CL) and Translation Studies (TS), tracing their evolution in recent history and outlining the role played by the computer corpus in revitalising and redirecting research in each discipline. The six articles in Section two are a series of case studies, showing the range of variables that have to be taken into consideration in CL and TS. The four articles in Section three all deal with practical issues of corpus exploitation, both the software tools that can be used to support analysis and the ways in which multilingual and monolingual corpora can be used to improve teaching and translation materials. -- pref.

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.

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.

This book examines the contribution of various recent developments in linguistics to contrastive analysis. The articles range across a broad gamut of languages, with most attention going to the languages of Europe. They show how advances in theory and computer technology are together impacting the field of contrastive linguistics. Part I focuses, from a broadly functional-cognitive viewpoint, on the close link with typology, stressing the importance of embedding the treatment of grammatical categories in their contexts of use. Part II turns to methodological issues, exploring the enormous potential offered by parallel, computer-accessible corpora to contrastive linguistics and to enhancing the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy of cross-linguistic studies. Part III is concerned with contrastive semantics, ranging from individual items to entire grammatical constructions, and shows how meanings are coupled to language-specific cognitive strategies and even to cultural differences in subjective awareness and the fashioning of personal identity.