Contrasting English And Other Languages Through Corpora

This volume is grounded on the latest research in empirical contrastive language studies, addressing several issues on contrasts between English and other languages. It results from an annual workshop on language contrasts, organised by the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), and covers a wider range of phenomena in phraseology, discourse and pragmatics. As it relies on data from parallel or comparable corpora, it gives valuable insights into cross-linguistic differences between English and other languages, which might otherwise go unnoticed. The book will be useful to experts on language studies and advanced students with an interest in linguistics. It will serve as a catalyst to other researchers interested in the contrastive analysis of the English language. The results of the linguistic analyses described within will be valuable for practical applications in lexicography, language teaching and translation (both human and machine), including translator training.

Through electronic corpora we can observe patterns which we were unaware of before or only vaguely glimpsed. The availability of multilingual corpora has led to a renewal of contrastive studies. We gain new insight into similarities and differences between languages, at the same time as the characteristics of each language are brought into relief. The present book focuses on the work in building and using the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. Case studies are reported on lexis, grammar, and discourse. A concluding chapter sums up problems and prospects of corpus-based contrastive studies, including applications in lexicography, translator training, and foreign-language teaching. Though the main focus is on English and Norwegian, the approach should be of interest more generally for corpus-based contrastive research and for language studies in general. Seeing through corpora we can see through language.

This book presents a model for describing translation performance as a basis for contrastive linguistics, in the realm of tense and aspect. It is based on extensive corpus studies investigating the differences between English and Portuguese using authentic translations in the two directions. In method and substance, the book features several original claims, trying to achieve a balance between theoretical issues and the presentation of concrete translation data. In addition, it deals with computational applications of parallel corpora. Translation-based corpus studies should thus be appropriate for translator education, and for introducing contrastive semantics and the methodology of corpus linguistics to students of linguistics and computer science. Researchers in tense and aspect, translation, and corpus linguistics are, nevertheless, the book’s primary audience.

Recent decades have seen a fundamental change and transformation in the commercialisation and popularisation of sports and sporting events. Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports uses corpus resources to offer new perspectives on the language and discourse of this increasingly popular and culturally significant area of research. Bringing together a range of empirical studies from leading scholars, this book bridges the gap between quantitative corpus approaches and more qualitative, multimodal discourse methods. Covering a wide range of sports, including football, cycling and basketball, the linguistic aspects of sports language are analysed across different genres and contexts. Highlighting the importance of studying the language of sports alongside its accompanying audio-visual modes of communication, chapters draw on new digitised collections of language to fully describe and understand the complexities of communication through various channels. In doing so, Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports not only offers exciting new insights into the language of sports but also extends the scope of corpus linguistics beyond traditional monomodal approaches to put multimodality firmly on the agenda.

This volume comprises a collection of contrastive studies on language and time. Languages represented include Czech, French, German, Mandarin, Norwegian and Swedish, all of which are contrasted with English. While the amount of published research on temporal relations in general is considerable, less work has been carried out on comparing how we talk about time in various languages and how languages change over time. Several methodological challenges are addressed and solutions proposed, such as how to deal with poor quality historical data and how to identify n-grams in typologically different languages for purposes of comparison. The results of the various studies show how multilingual corpora can increase our knowledge of language-specific features as well as linguistic, typological and cultural differences and similarities across languages.

This is the very first book to investigate the field of phraseology from a learner corpus perspective, bringing together studies at the cutting edge of corpus-based research into phraseology and language learners. The chapters include learner-corpus-based studies of phraseological units in varieties of learner language differentiated in terms of task and/or learner variables, compared with each other or with one or more reference corpora; mixed-methods studies that combine learner corpus data with more experimental data types (e.g. eyetracking); and instruction-oriented studies that show how learner-corpus-based insights can be used to inform second language (L2) teaching and testing. The detailed analysis of a wide range of multiword units (collocations, lexical bundles, lexico-grammatical patterns) and extensive learner corpus data provide the reader with a comprehensive theoretical, methodological and applied perspective onto L2 use in a wide range of situations. The knowledge gained from these learner corpus studies has major implications for L2 theory and practice and will help to inform pedagogical assessment and practice.

Contrastive Linguistics is an expanding field, as witnessed by the publication in recent years of an increasing number of monographs, collected volumes and journal articles. The present volume, which comprises an introduction and ten chapters dealing with lexical contrasts between English and other languages, shows advances within the well-established lexical work in the field. Each of the chapters takes lexical items as its starting point and compares English with one or more languages. The languages represented are Spanish, Lithuanian, Swedish, German, Norwegian and Czech. Furthermore, they emphasise the link between lexis and grammar, not only within the same language, but also across languages. Finally, several studies represent one of the more recent developments of contrastive linguistics, namely a growing focus on genre and register comparisons. The book should appeal to both established scholars and advanced students with an interest in lexis, genre, corpus linguistics and/or contrastive linguistics.

The present volume contains selected proceedings from the fifth edition of the Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (UCCTS) international conference held at the University of Louvain in September 2018. It brings together thirteen chapters that all make use of electronic comparable and/or parallel corpora to inform contrastive linguistics, translation theory, translation pedagogy, translation quality assessment and multilingual terminology. The volume is structured in five thematic sections, devoted to learner-focused descriptive translation studies, corpus use in translator training, studies of translated and edited language, contrastive linguistics, and terminology. Together, the contributions in the volume reflect recent developments in corpus-based cross-linguistic studies, such as the compilation and analysis of learner translation corpora to identify the typical features of learner translated language and inform translator training, the comparative analysis of translation and other forms of mediated communication, such as editing, the compilation of new multilingual corpora and the analysis of under-researched linguistic phenomena, such as punctuation. The volume also testifies to the growing cross-fertilization between contrastive linguistics and translation studies, both in terms of methodology (e.g. the combined use of different types of corpora and the exploration of corpus-driven methods) and theory (e.g. the role played by source language influence and cross-linguistic contrasts in translation).