The intuition that translations are somehow different from texts that are not translations has been around for many years, but most of the common linguistic frameworks are not comprehensive enough to account for the wealth and complexity of linguistic phenomena that make a translation a special kind of text. The present book provides a novel methodology for investigating the specific linguistic properties of translations. As this methodology is both corpus-based and driven by a functional theory of language, it is powerful enough to account for the multi-dimensional nature of cross-linguistic variation in translations and cross-lingually comparable texts.

Douglas Biber's new book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in his ground breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing (CUP 1988). In Dimensions of Register Variation he gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely differing languages: English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali. Using the multi-dimensional analytical framework employed in his earlier work, Biber carries out a principled comparison of both synchronic and diachronic patterns of variation across the four languages. Striking similarities as well as differences emerge, allowing Biber to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation. This major new work will provide the foundation for the further investigation of cross-linguistic universals governing the pattern of discourse variation across registers, and will be of wide interest to any scholar interested in style, register and literacy.

The book specifies a corpus architecture, including annotation and querying techniques, and its implementation. The corpus architecture is developed for empirical studies of translations, and beyond those for the study of texts which are inter-lingually comparable, particularly texts of similar registers. The compiled corpus, CroCo, is a resource for research and is, with some copyright restrictions, accessible to other research projects. Most of the research was undertaken as part of a DFG-Project into linguistic properties of translations. Fundamentally, this research project was a corpus-based investigation into the language pair English-German. The long-term goal is a contribution to the study of translation as a contact variety, and beyond this to language comparison and language contact more generally with the language pair English - German as our object languages. This goal implies a thorough interest in possible specific properties of translations, and beyond this in an empirical translation theory. The methodology developed is not restricted to the traditional exclusively system-based comparison of earlier days, where real-text excerpts or constructed examples are used as mere illustrations of assumptions and claims, but instead implements an empirical research strategy involving structured data (the sub-corpora and their relationships to each other, annotated and aligned on various theoretically motivated levels of representation), the formation of hypotheses and their operationalizations, statistics on the data, critical examinations of their significance, and interpretation against the background of system-based comparisons and other independent sources of explanation for the phenomena observed. Further applications of the resource developed in computational linguistics are outlined and evaluated.

Deixis – the rooting of utterances in the speech situation – is one of the most salient universals of natural language. The ways in which different languages link utterances to pragmatic factors such as speech time, speech place, and speech participants show a rich variation. This makes deixis a particular fruitful domain for the study of universals, language comparison, and the relationship between language and reality. This volume presents and discusses deictic systems of both Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages, including Russian, Czech, Spanish, German (standard and dialect), Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, Hausa, Swahili, Hopi, Eipo, Tolai, Diyari. Focus is on spatial deixis, but other deictic and demonstrative expressions are treated as well.

This book provides readers with a unique array of scholarly reflections on the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in relation to reading processes and data-driven interpretations of cross-language transfer. Distinctively broad in scope, topics addressed in this volume include word reading with respect to orthographic, phonological, morphological, and semantic processing as well as cross-linguistic influences on reading in English as a second language or a foreign language. Given that the three focal scripts have unique orthographic features not found in other languages – Chinese as logography, Japanese with multi-scripts, and Korean as non-Roman alphasyllabary – chapters expound script-universal and script-specific reading processes. As a means of scaling up the body of knowledge traditionally focused on Anglocentric reading research, the scientific accounts articulated in this volume importantly expand the field’s current theoretical frameworks of word processing to theory building with regard to these three languages.