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 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.

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 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.

This volume takes stock of current research in contrastive lexical studies. It reflects the growing interest in corpus-based approaches to the study of lexis, in particular the use of multilingual corpora, shared by researchers working in widely differing fields - contrastive linguistics, lexicology, lexicography, terminology, computational linguistics and machine translation. The articles in the volume, which cover a wide diversity of languages, are divided into four main sections: the exploration of cross-linguistic equivalence, contrastive lexical semantics, corpus-based multilingual lexicography, and translation and parallel concordancing. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to recent trends in contrastive lexical studies written by the editors of the volume, Bengt Altenberg and Sylviane Granger.

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.

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).