Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics


Book Description

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 Studies of English and Chinese


Book Description

This book is concerned with cross-linguistic contrast of major grammatical categories in English and Chinese, two most important yet genetically different world languages. This genetic difference has resulted in many subsidiary differences that are, among other things, related to grammar. Compared with typologically related languages, cross-linguistic contrast of English and Chinese is more challenging yet promising. The main theme of this book lies in its focus on cross-linguistic contrast of aspect-related grammatical categories, or, grammatical categories that contribute to aspectual meaning – both situation aspect at the semantic level and viewpoint aspect at the grammatical level – in English and Chinese. The unique strength of this volume lies in that it is first corpus-based book contrasting English and Chinese. Given that the state of the art in language studies is to use corpora, the significance of the marriage between contrastive studies and the corpus methodology in this book is not to be underestimated.




Advances in Corpus-Based Contrastive Linguistics


Book Description

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.




Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age


Book Description

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.




Corpus Studies in Contrastive Linguistics


Book Description

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.




Corpus-based Language Studies


Book Description

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.




Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics


Book Description

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.




Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies


Book Description

This volume assesses the state of the art of parallel corpus research as a whole, reporting on advances in both recent developments of parallel corpora – with some particular references to comparable corpora as well– and in ways of exploiting them for a variety of purposes. The first part of the book is devoted to new roles that parallel corpora can and should assume in translation studies and in contrastive linguistics, to the usefulness and usability of parallel corpora, and to advances in parallel corpus alignment, annotation and retrieval. There follows an up-to-date presentation of a number of parallel corpus projects currently being carried out in Europe, some of them multimodal, with certain chapters illustrating case studies developed on the basis of the corpora at hand. In most of these chapters, attention is paid to specific technical issues of corpus building. The third part of the book reflects on specific applications and on the creation of bilingual resources from parallel corpora. This volume will be welcomed by scholars, postgraduate and PhD students in the fields of contrastive linguistics, translation studies, lexicography, language teaching and learning, machine translation, and natural language processing.




Contrastive Analysis in Language


Book Description

This is a book about comparison in linguistics in general, rather than 'contrastive analysis' as a distinct branch of linguistics. It addresses the question 'Does the analytical apparatus used by linguists allow comparisons to be made across languages?' Four major domains are considered in turn: derivational morphology, syntax, semantics & pragmatics, and discourse. Contributions cover a broad spectrum of linguistic disciplines, ranging from contrastive linguistics and linguistic typology to translation studies and historical linguistics.




New Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics


Book Description

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