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This book brings together a collection of articles characterized by two main themes: the contrastive study of parallel phenomena in two or more languages, and an essentially functional approach in which language is regarded, first and foremost, as a rich and complex communication system, inextricably embedded in sociocultural and psychological contexts of use. The majority of the studies reported are empirical in nature, many making use of corpora or other textual materials in the language(s) under investigation. The book begins with an introductory section in which the editors provide surveys of the state of the art in both functional and contrastive linguistics. The other five sections of the volume are devoted to (i) a cognitive perspective on form and function, (ii) information structure, (iii) collocations and formulaic language, (iv) language learning, and (v) discourse and culture.
Main headings: Introduction. - I. Representing language use. - II. Grammar and lexis in English corpora. - III. Contrastive and translation studies. - IV. English abroad. - List of Stig Johansson's publications (selection).
In recent years there has been increasing interest in the development and use of bilingual and multilingual corpora. As Karin Aijmer writes in this book, 'The contrastive or comparative perspective ... makes it possible to dig deeper and to ask new questions about the relationship between languages with the aim of sharpening our conceptions of cross-linguistic correspondences and adding to our knowledge of the languages compared.' The papers in this volume are a showcase of the great variety of purposes to which bilingual and multilingual corpora can be put. They do not only lend themselves to descriptive and applied approaches, but are also suitable for theory-oriented studies. The range of linguistic phenomena covered by the various approaches is very wide; the papers focus on fields of research like syntax, discourse, semantics, information structure, lexis, and translation studies. The range of languages studied comprises English, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Dutch, and Portuguese. In addition to purely linguistic papers, there are contributions on computer programs developed for the compilation and use of bilingual and multilingual corpora.
The twenty papers of this volume - published to honour Gunnel Tottie - are of interest to everyone concerned with the study of the English language. The collection is a convincing argument for an approach to language studies based on the analysis of computerized corpora. Though this is not an introduction to the field but a series of highly specialized studies, readers get a good overview of the work being done at present in English computer corpus studies. English corpus linguistics, though basically concerned with the study of varieties of English, goes far beyond the simple ordering and counting of large numbers of examples but is deeply concerned with linguistic theory - based on real language data. The volume includes sections on corpora of written and spoken present-day English, historical corpora, contrastive corpora, and on the application of corpus studies to teaching purposes.
This volume sheds new light on verb constructions by exposing them to cross-linguistic analysis based on multilingual corpora. It is composed of nine studies which provide insights into various aspects of cross-linguistic diversity, including showing that seemingly equivalent verb constructions may differ in their semantics, and that similar meanings may be expressed by different types of constructions. In other words, this book shows that different languages have different ways of lexicalising verb-based meanings, most notably by means of other, divergent verb constructions. A range of lexicogrammatical aspects of verb constructions are explored throughout the book, including time reference...
Corpus Linguistics seeks to provide a comprehensive sampling of real-life usage in a given language, and to use these empirical data to test language hypotheses. Modern corpus linguistics began fifty years ago, but the subject has seen explosive growth since the early 1990s. These days corpora are being used to advance virtually every aspect of language study, from computer processing techniques such as machine translation, to literary stylistics, social aspects of language use, and improved language-teaching methods. Because corpus linguistics has grown fast from small beginnings, newcomers to the field often find it hard to get their bearings. Important papers can be difficult to track dow...
Collocations are both pervasive in language and difficult for language learners, even at an advanced level. In this book, these difficulties are for the first time comprehensively investigated. On the basis of a learner corpus, idiosyncratic collocation use by learners is uncovered, the building material of learner collocations examined, and the factors that contribute to the difficulty of certain groups of collocations identified. An extensive discussion of the implications of the results for the foreign language classroom is also presented, and the contentious issue of the relation of corpus linguistic research and language teaching is thus extended to learner corpus analysis.
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.
The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.
The present volume draws together contributions from a number of scholars with an interest in empirical, cross-linguistic description. Most of the papers were first presented at the symposium Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective held in Oslo in November/December 2000. The descriptions are functionally oriented, and their common focus is how information structure – in a broad sense – can be compared across languages. 'Information structure' has been approached in a variety of ways by the authors, so as to give a broad picture of this fundamental principle of text production, involving the way in which a speaker/writer chooses to present a message in terms of given/new information, focus, cohesion, and point of view. Central to much of the research is the problem of establishing criteria for isolating linguistic constraints on language use from cultural-linguistic conventions in text production. The linguistic comparison includes English, German and/or one of the Scandinavian languages, with sidelights to other languages. Most of the papers are text- or corpus-based, and the ongoing work on parallel corpora in Scandinavia is reflected in several contributions.