Contrastive Corpus Linguistics: Patterns in Lexicogrammar and Discourse (Corpus and Discourse)

Marking 30 years of contrastive corpus linguistics, this volume provides a state-of-the-art of the field, charting its development over time and expanding the boundaries of the discipline. Focusing on a diversity of methods and approaches to language comparison, it uses both comparable and translation corpora, and explores a broad range of language registers from newspaper reporting and spoken political discourse to film scripts and football match reports. Using English as the pivot language for each chapter, the volume offers contrastive bilingual and trilingual perspectives on a number of languages, including Czech, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, covering a typologically diverse field. By exploring the application of complex multi-genre multilingual data sets and expanding the horizons of contrastive studies, it demonstrates how a juxtaposition of cross-linguistic and register variation can deepen our insight into language variation and use. The volume is dedicated to two prominent contrastive corpus linguists: Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, who have decisively shaped the discipline from its very beginnings. The book opens with a chapter by Aijmer, reflecting on the current breadth and future prospects of research in the area while pointing to emergent trends with an insight that only she can offer.

Anna Cermakova is a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University, UK and EdTech consultant for WiKIT, AS.

Michaela Mahlberg is Humboldt-Professor and Professor of Digital Humanities at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.

Hilde Hasselgård is Professor of English Language at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Gavin Brookes is Senior Research Associate within the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK.

Markéta Malá is Associate Professor of English Language at Charles University, Czech Republic.