This volume addresses a series of theoretical and methodological challenges in the domain of corpus-based contrastive studies. It provides an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (including transla

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.

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.

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.

Corpus-based contrastive and translation research are areas that keep evolving in the digital age, as the range of new corpus resources and tools expands, opening up to different approaches and application contexts. The current book contains a selection of papers which focus on corpora and translation research in the digital age, outlining some recent advances and explorations. After an introductory chapter which outlines language technologies applied to translation and interpreting with a view to identifying challenges and research opportunities, the first part of the book is devoted to current advances in the creation of new parallel corpora for under-researched areas, the development of tools to manage parallel corpora or as an alternative to parallel corpora, and new methodologies to improve existing translation memory systems. The contributions in the second part of the book address a number of cutting-edge linguistic issues in the area of contrastive discourse studies and translation analysis on the basis of comparable and parallel corpora in several languages such as English, German, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish, thus showcasing the richness of the linguistic diversity carried out in these recent investigations. Given the multiplicity of topics, methodologies and languages studied in the different chapters, the book will be of interest to a wide audience working in the fields of translation studies, contrastive linguistics and the automatic processing of language.

Why is a raven like a writing-desk? The concept of similarity lies at the heart of this new book on contrastive analysis. Similarity judgements depend partly on properties of the objects being compared, and partly on what the person judging considers to be relevant to the assessment; similarity thus has both objective and subjective aspects. The author shows how contrastive analysis and translation theory make use of the concept in different ways, and explains how it relates to the problematic notions of equivalence and tertium comparationis. The book then develops a meaning-based contrastive methodology, and outlines one theory of semantic structure which can be used in this methodology. The approach is illustrated with four sample studies covering different kinds of phenomena in some European languages. The final part of the book proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to cover contrastive rhetoric: the aim is to suggest a unified approach linking aspects of semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric. Keywords: similarity, contrastive analysis, functional grammar, semantics, rhetoric, translation.

Over the last years, research in text linguistics has yielded insights into different levels of methodological reflection and practice, resulting in new issues for investigation. On the one hand, the development of computerized corpora and "hypertextual" reading has reminded researchers that the text is a complex object, both linear and network-like, and largely shaped by its context: how can analysis grapple with such a complexity? On the other hand, the processing of computerized corpora raises new methodological questions about the textual units chosen for analysis or about the use of grammatical categories as tools for stylistic and generic characterization of texts.This volume hopes to offer some constructive reflection on these challenging issues. The selected papers either demonstrate the value of some innovative method of analysis through concrete applications, or develop strong and well-argued epistemological positions, illustrated with examples. Interdisciplinary contributions are also represented: when dealing with "regulating concepts" such as "corpus", "inter-/co-text", "speech genre", etc., various domains including stylistics, genetic criticism, contrastive research, didactic approaches, statistical linguistics and discourse analysis share a common interest with text linguistics.