27.4537, Calls: Gen Ling, Historical Ling, Text/Corpus Ling, Translation, Typology/Switzerland

Mon Nov 7 19:24:44 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4537. Mon Nov 07 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4537, Calls: Gen Ling, Historical Ling, Text/Corpus Ling, Translation, Typology/Switzerland

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Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2016 14:24:36
From: Renata Enghels [renata.enghels at UGent.be]
Subject: New Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics: Empirical and Methodological Challenges

Full Title: New Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics: Empirical and Methodological Challenges 

Date: 10-Sep-2017 - 13-Sep-2017
Location: Zurich, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Renata Enghels
Meeting Email: renata.enghels at ugent.be

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Translation; Typology 

Call Deadline: 20-Nov-2016 

Meeting Description:

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a
cyclic pattern of interest (Granger 2003; Schmied 2008). In the 1990s
contrastive linguistics underwent a significant revival, which mainly
originated from its meeting with corpus linguistics. This has led to a new
wave of corpus-based contrastive studies. Still, until today there are two
main challenges that have not yet been fully addressed.

The first challenge of contrastive linguistics relates to the variable nature
of the empirical data it resorts to. Many contrastive linguists have turned to
translation studies as a means of establishing cross-linguistic relationships
(Granger, Lerot, Petch-Tyson 2003). However, the use of parallel corpora as a
source for contrastive linguistic research has not always gone undisputed. The
most frequently cited disadvantages relate to (1) translation universals and,
(2) interference between the language of the source-text and the translated
text (Johansson 1998. However, contrary to these stated shortcomings, a
commonly cited advantage of the use of parallel corpora relates to the tertium
comparationis, i.e. a “common platform of comparison” (Connor & Moreno 2005:
157) against which differences can be described. The difficulty of
establishing full comparability indeed constitutes one of the major stumbling
blocks in the use of comparable corpora. Taking into account these limitations
of both translation and comparable data, more recently, several linguists have
argued in favor of a combination of the two, as complementary sources for
cross-linguistic comparison (among others Viberg 2005; Altenberg and Granger
2002). However, up to the present, this combined corpus method has not yet
been exploited to its full potential.

Moreover, in the last decade the analytical possibilities seem to have
increased considerably as ever more multilingual data are made available.
Contrastive linguistics not only benefits from the creation of huge web
corpora (such as WebCorp and Sketch Engine), a growing number of new data
types is becoming available, like subtitle corpora (e.g. Levshina, forthc.) or
the Wikipedia Parallel Titles Corpora. Besides the fact that the use of these
resources is perhaps not yet widespread among linguists, the question of
whether these different data can be applied to answer different contrastive
research questions still remains to be answered.  

A second challenge of contrastive linguistics relates to the methodological
branch of corpus-based contrastive linguistics, which, according to Gast
(2015: 5), “is still tender”. Indeed, if a more advanced standard of methods
and procedures is becoming common ground in monolingual studies (such as
logistic and mixed-effects regression techniques), the implementation of such
techniques is still in its infancy in the field of contrastive linguistics.
What is more, the more advanced methodological tools that are suited to study
the multidimensional nature of linguistic phenomena within one language,
cannot be directly transferred to contrastive data without a thoughtful
consideration, given the increased complexity of the latter.

Conveners: Renata Enghels, Marlies Jansegers, Clara Vanderschueren

Call for Papers:

This workshop aims at bringing together linguists working in different areas
(synchronic, historical, and contrastive linguistics; translation or
typological studies, etc.), and on different languages in order to reflect on
the value and applicability of different kinds of empirical data for
contrastive linguistics, and to contribute to methodological and theoretical
advances in this domain. We particularly welcome submissions dealing with
contrastive (case)studies making use of (more) rigorous empirically-based
contrastive analyses (based on corpus data and/or experimental data) and/or
making use of new data types, like subtitle corpora and web corpora. As such,
we invite speakers to collectively discuss the methodological apparatus of
Contrastive Linguistics, dealing with, but not limited to, the following
questions:

-How can we most efficiently make use of translation corpora for contrastive
linguistics, while taking into account linguistic interferences and
translation universals? 
-What (new) types of data are the most useful for what kind of contrastive
questions? 
-Is it mandatory to complement translation data with comparable corpus data,
or does this depend on the level of linguistic analysis (e.g. studies on
lexical cognates vs. syntactic cognates vs. pragmatic phenomena, etc.)?
-Which (advanced) statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the
multidimensionality of contrastive research questions?
-How can we go beyond a mere comparison of frequency tables between different
comparable corpora? 
-How can we compare multifactoriality behind specific linguistic phenomena
between two or more languages?

This is a workshop proposal for the 2017 SLE conference that will take place
in Zürich (10–13 September): http://sle2017.eu/. If you are interested in
participating in this workshop, please contact us before November 20 by
sending us a (provisional) title of your contribution, as well as an abstract
of approximately 300 words.

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