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Article published In:
The Complementary Contribution of Comparable and Parallel Corpora to Crosslinguistic Studies
Edited by Sylviane Granger and Marie-Aude Lefer
[Languages in Contrast 20:2] 2020
► pp. 184–208

Corpus-based contrastive studies

Beginnings, developments and directions

ORCID logo | University of Oslo , Norway

This article outlines the beginnings of corpus-based contrastive studies with special reference to the development of parallel corpora that took place in Scandinavia in the early 1990s under the direction of Stig Johansson. It then discusses multilingual corpus types and methodological issues of their exploration, including the tertium comparationis for contrastive studies based on different types of corpora. Some glimpses are offered of recent developments and current trends in the field, including the widening scope of corpus-based contrastive analysis, concerning language pairs as well as the kinds of topics studied and the methods used. The paper ends by identifying and discussing some challenges for the field and indicating prospects and directions for its future.

Keywords: contrastive analysis, multilingual corpus, parallel corpus, comparable corpus, tertium comparationis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Beginnings and early developments
  • 3.Using corpora in contrastive studies
    • 3.1Types of multilingual corpora
    • 3.2Multilingual corpora and contrastive analysis methodology
  • 4.Ongoing developments
    • 4.1The development of corpus-based CA through the lens of Languages in Contrast
    • 4.2Widening the scope: Current trends
  • 5.Challenges for corpus-based contrastive linguistics
  • 6.Future directions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00015.has
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