Through electronic corpora we can observe patterns which we were unaware of before or only vaguely glimpsed. The availability of multilingual corpora has led to a renewal of contrastive studies. We gain new insight into similarities and differences between languages, at the same time as the characteristics of each language are brought into relief. The present book focuses on the work in building and using the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. Case studies are reported on lexis, grammar, and discourse. A concluding chapter sums up problems and prospects of corpus-based contrastive studies, including applications in lexicography, translator training, and foreign-language teaching. Though the main focus is on English and Norwegian, the approach should be of interest more generally for corpus-based contrastive research and for language studies in general. Seeing through corpora we can see through language.

Through electronic corpora we can observe patterns which we were unaware of before or only vaguely glimpsed. The availability of multilingual corpora has led to a renewal of contrastive studies. We gain new insight into similarities and differences between languages, at the same time as the characteristics of each language are brought into relief. The present book focuses on the work in building and using the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. Case studies are reported on lexis, grammar, and discourse. A concluding chapter sums up problems and prospects of corpus-based contrastive studies, including applications in lexicography, translator training, and foreign-language teaching. Though the main focus is on English and Norwegian, the approach should be of interest more generally for corpus-based contrastive research and for language studies in general. Seeing through corpora we can see through language.

The use of corpus data in languages other than English has become increasingly important in recent years, and as a result has given rise to a growing body of research and applications in multilingual corpus linguistics. This book collects together a selection of papers which have made use of multilingual corpus data in language teaching, as well as linguistic research. The corpora described in this book include data in a variety of languages, including Swedish, Chinese, German and Italian, and the contributors include well known scholars in the fields of corpus linguistics and corpus-based language teaching.

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.

This book provides an up-to-date snapshot of recent research and developments in the use of corpora for language learning and teaching. It is divided into three parts. Part I focusses on innovative uses of corpora by language teachers and learners. These cover the world's first corpus-based TV program for the teaching of English conversation, as well as corpus-based approaches to the teaching of EAP, cultural studies and translation. Part II focuses on new corpus-based tools for LSP learning. Part III illustrates research findings from corpora consisting of language learner data and discusses their implications for language teaching and learning. It will appeal to scholars in both language teaching and learning and corpus and computational linguistics.

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.

Corpus linguistics is the study of language data on a large scale - the computer-aided analysis of very extensive collections of transcribed utterances or written texts. This textbook outlines the basic methods of corpus linguistics, explains how the discipline of corpus linguistics developed and surveys the major approaches to the use of corpus data. It uses a broad range of examples to show how corpus data has led to methodological and theoretical innovation in linguistics in general. Clear and detailed explanations lay out the key issues of method and theory in contemporary corpus linguistics. A structured and coherent narrative links the historical development of the field to current topics in 'mainstream' linguistics. Practical tasks and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter encourage students to test their understanding of what they have read and an extensive glossary provides easy access to definitions of technical terms used in the text.