Renata Enghels - Böcker

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.

This book aims to provide a better understanding of convergence and non-convergence phenomena, such as divergence, from different theoretical perspectives. It brings together nine case studies that deal with contact between languages found in the Iberian Peninsula (Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese and Basque), between Spanish or Portuguese and another language (such as English), and between different varieties from Europe and other continents. The volume thus unites views from two fields that rarely interact: contact linguistics and dialectology. It discusses the mechanisms and consequences of language contact within the Ibero-Romance world, a geographical space characterised by a high rate of multilingual speakers and settings. The contributions deal with various combinations of convergence and divergence, for example between different varieties of the same language, language stability despite contact, as well as less studied aspects, such as the relation between language contact and second language acquisition, the linguistic landscape perspective of language contact, and divergence in linguistic identity construction.

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.

This book aims to provide a better understanding of convergence and non-convergence phenomena, such as divergence, from different theoretical perspectives. It brings together nine case studies that deal with contact between languages found in the Iberian Peninsula (Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese and Basque), between Spanish or Portuguese and another language (such as English), and between different varieties from Europe and other continents. The volume thus unites views from two fields that rarely interact: contact linguistics and dialectology. It discusses the mechanisms and consequences of language contact within the Ibero-Romance world, a geographical space characterised by a high rate of multilingual speakers and settings. The contributions deal with various combinations of convergence and divergence, for example between different varieties of the same language, language stability despite contact, as well as less studied aspects, such as the relation between language contact and second language acquisition, the linguistic landscape perspective of language contact, and divergence in linguistic identity construction.

This book presents synchronic and diachronic studies on verbal periphrases in a range of Romance languages to clarify the boundaries of the category, the features, origin and development of specific constructions, and the interrelations between them. In doing so, it seeks to reinforce the synergies between the theoretical contributions of grammaticalization, constructionalization, and the study of texts in their philological sense more properly, looking into the effects of discourse traditions. The individual chapters adopt diverse analytic perspectives and theoretical and methodological frameworks, and integrate results applying qualitative, quantitative, and psycholinguistic methods.