Full Description
Much of the "new wave" of contrastive linguistics has focused on aspects of the grammatical system, examining phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic similarities and differences across two or more languages. As with many other areas of linguistics, there exists a renewed interest in discourse perspectives in the study of languages in contrast, and much of that work uses corpora and corpus linguistics techniques to study language. This volume provides examples of cutting-edge research in contrastive analyses of different languages. The papers have been organized around four themes: studies of discourse markers; information structure; registers and genres; and phraseology. The languages included (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish) cover a range of European languages, showing not only diversity in their grammatical structures, but also subtle differences that are the focus of many of the papers. The techniques used, from concordancing and careful annotation to painstaking qualitative analysis, showcase the variety of approaches to the study of languages in contrast and include contributions from discourse, corpus and functional perspectives.
Contents
Introduction Functional and Corpus Perspectives in Contrastive Discourse Analysis Maite Taboada, Susana Doval Suarez and Elsa Gonzalez Alvarez 1. Discourse Markers and Coherence Relations: Comparison across Markers, Languages and Modalities Maite Taboada and Maria de los Angeles Gomez Gonzalez, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain 2. Pragmatic Triangulation and Misunderstanding: A Prosodic Perspective Jesus Romero-Trillo, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain 3. Spanish venga and its English Equivalents: A Contrastive Study of Teenage Talk Anna-Britta Stenstrom, University of Bergen, Norway 4. Discourse Markers in French and German: Reasons for an Asymmetry Severine Adam and Martine Dalmas, Universite Paris-Sorbonne, France 5. Thematic Parentheticals in Dutch and English Mike Hannay, VU University Amsterdam, and Maria de los Angeles Gomez Gonzalez 6. Word Order and Information Structure in English and Swedish Jennifer Herriman, University of Gothenburg, Sweden 7. The Use of It-clefts in the Written Production of Spanish Advanced Learners of English Susana Doval Suarez and Elsa Gonzalez Alvarez 8. Annotating Thematic Features in English and Spanish: A Contrastive Corpus-based Study Jorge Arus Hita, Julia Lavid and Lara Moraton, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain 9. Topic and Topicality in Text: A Contrastive Study of English and Spanish Narrative Texts Raquel Hidalgo and Angela Downing, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain 10. Towards a Comparison of Cohesive Reference in English and German: System and Text Kerstin Kunz and Erich Steiner, Universitat des Saarlandes, Germany 11. Genre- and Culture-specific Aspects of Evaluation: Insights from the Contrastive Analysis of English and Italian Online Property Advertising Gabrina Pounds, University of East Anglia, UK 12. Contrastive Analysis of Evaluation in Text: Key Issues in the Design of an Annotation System for Attitude Applicable to Consumer Reviews in English and Spanish Maite Taboada and Marta Carretero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain 13. An Annotation Scheme for Dynamic Modality in English and Spanish Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla and Marta Carretero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain 14. Corpus Analysis and Phraseology: Transfer of Multi-word Units Juan Pedro Rica Peromingo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain 15. Lying as a Metaphor in a Bilingual Phraseological Corpus (German-Spanish) Ana Mansilla, Universidad de Murcia, Spain
