Contrastive Linguistics is an expanding field, as witnessed by the publication in recent years of an increasing number of monographs, collected volumes and journal articles. The present volume, which comprises an introduction and ten chapters dealing with lexical contrasts between English and other languages, shows advances within the well-established lexical work in the field. Each of the chapters takes lexical items as its starting point and compares English with one or more languages. The languages represented are Spanish, Lithuanian, Swedish, German, Norwegian and Czech. Furthermore, they emphasise the link between lexis and grammar, not only within the same language, but also across languages. Finally, several studies represent one of the more recent developments of contrastive linguistics, namely a growing focus on genre and register comparisons. The book should appeal to both established scholars and advanced students with an interest in lexis, genre, corpus linguistics and/or contrastive linguistics.

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; modality; voice; light verb constructions; non-finite complementation of lexical verbs; posture-verb constructions; semiperiphrastic constructions; and the construction and semantic composition of verbs of putting. All of the contributions consider English in comparison with at least one of the following languages: Czech, German, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. As such, this volume offers a truly multilingual perspective on verb constructions. The diversity of comparisons also highlights the multi-faceted nature of the verb phrase, which seems to have virtually limitless potential for exploration in the fields of tense, aspect, modality, lexical semantics, syntax, and phraseology.

For many years, the development of theories about the way children learn to read and write was dominated by studies of English-speaking populations. As we have learned more about the way that children learn to read and write other scripts - whether they have less regularity in their grapheme-phoneme correspondences or do not make use of alphabetic symbols at all - it has become clear that many of the difficulties that confront children learning to read and write English specifically are less evident, or even non-existent, in other populations. At the same time, some aspects of learning to read and write are very similar across scripts. The unique cross-linguistic perspective offered in this book, including chapters on Japanese, Greek and the Scandinavian languages as well as English, shows how the processes of learning to read and spell are affected by the characteristics of the writing system that children are learning to master.

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.

This book brings together selected revised papers representing a multidisciplinary approach to language and literature. The collection presents studies performed using the methods of computational linguistics in accordance with the traditions of Russian linguistic and literary studies, primarily in line with the Leningrad (Petersburg) philological school. The book comprises the papers allocated into 2 sections discussing the study of corpora in language, translation, and literary studies and the use of computing in language teaching and translation and in emotional text processing. A unique feature of the presented collection is that the papers, compiled in one volume, allow readers to get an understanding of a wide range of research conducted in Saint Petersburg State University and other Russian leading scientific institutions. Both the classical tradition of Saint Petersburg philology and the results obtained with the help of new computer technologies as a sample of the symbiosis of technologies and traditions, which bring research to a qualitatively new level, arouse interest.

This volume offers a state-of-the-art picture of work undertaken in the field of computer-aided corpus linguistics. While the focus is on English, central insights can be generalised to other languages, as well. As a work intended to mark the Silver Jubilee of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, the book combines surveys of the discipline by some of its major pioneers, including founders of ICAME itself, with cutting-edge work by younger scholars. It is divided into three sections: “Overviewing years of corpus linguistic studies”, “Descriptive studies in English syntax and semantics”, and “Second Language Acquisition, parallel corpora and specialist corpora”. The book bears witness to the impressive advances that have characterised the development of corpus linguistics over the past few decades – from terminological issues to practical applications, from theoretical and descriptive research to applied approaches, from monolingual to multilingual and specialist corpora, from corpus design to corpus exploitation tools.