Article in:
The Complementary Contribution of Comparable and Parallel Corpora to Crosslinguistic StudiesEdited by Sylviane Granger and Marie-Aude Lefer
[Languages in Contrast 20:2] 2020
► pp. 184–208
Corpus-based contrastive studies
Beginnings, developments and directions
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: tertium comparationis, multilingual corpus, contrastive analysis, comparable corpus, parallel corpus
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