24.3381, Review: Text/Corpus Linguistics: Marzo, Heylen, & De Sutter (eds.) (2012)

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Subject: 24.3381, Review: Text/Corpus Linguistics: Marzo, Heylen, & De Sutter (eds.) (2012)

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Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 09:47:27
From: Jesús Fernández-Domínguez [jesusferdom at gmail.com]
Subject: Corpus Studies in Contrastive Linguistics

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-4287.html

EDITOR: Stefania  Marzo
EDITOR: Kris  Heylen
EDITOR: Gert De  Sutter
TITLE: Corpus Studies in Contrastive Linguistics
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics 43
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, Universitat de València

SUMMARY

The publication under review brings together six papers from the field of
corpus-based contrastive linguistics, most of which were originally presented
at the 5th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-5) held in
Leuven in 2008. The volume is made up of a brief presentation by the editors
followed by the six contributions, each of which includes an abstract,
endnotes, bibliographic references and appendices, where necessary. The book
contains a subject index.

The volume opens with the editors’ introduction, “Developments in corpus-based
contrastive linguistics”, where they offer a general overview of the history
of contrastive linguistics from a corpus-based perspective, outline the scope
of the book and sketch the contents of the contributions. This foreword also
justifies the presence of articles with a focus on semantic and pragmatic
phenomena, and presents the goals of the volume as descriptive and theoretical
in nature.

The first contribution is by Dirk Noël and Timothy Colleman: “Believe-type
raising-to-object and raising-to-subject verbs in English and Dutch”. This
article adopts a diachronic perspective to question the status of the
so-called “raising-to-subject” pattern as a passive equivalent of
“raising-to-object”, which has remained productive in English but not so in
Dutch. The investigation makes use of two comparable corpora, the Corpus of
Late Modern English Texts (CLMET) and one compiled along the same principles
for Dutch (see Noël & Colleman 2009), with data in both languages from the
17th to the 20th century. A “distinctive collexeme analysis” (Gries &
Stefanowitsch 2004) of the two constructions is undertaken in order to examine
collocational preferences and differences in constructional semantics. The
findings from this analysis confirm that there exists a group of English verbs
with a strong preference for the “nominativus cum infinitivo” pattern, and
that this pattern, though structurally passive, probably does not have a
passive symbolic value. Various statistical tests show that the usage of the
“accusativus cum infinitivo” and “nominativus cum infinitivo” variants does
not simply depend on their active/passive voice, but on other symbolic values
too.

In “Contingency hedges in Dutch, French and English” Bart Defrancq and Gert De
Sutter look at elements which are used to linguistically moderate somebody’s
viewpoint. The data used in the paper is derived from the British National
Corpus, the Valibel corpus of Belgian French and the Corpus Gesproken
Nederlands (the former two with around 10 million words each, the latter with
3.5 million words). The authors start by noting that English and French have
one verb to perform hedging (‘depend’ and ‘dépendre’, respectively), while
three options exist in Dutch (‘afhangen’, ‘te zien zijn’ and ‘liggen’). The
two central questions that this work tries to answer are, first, in which way
the three Dutch units correspond to the English and French one and, second,
what the relationship is between ‘afhangen’, ‘te zien zijn’ and ‘liggen’ in
Dutch. After a thorough series of frequency-based analyses, the authors
determine that the hedging elements under study are dependent on previously
occurring discursive information, and that they always carry a conditional or
causal pragmatic load. The reader will find particular value in the
statistical tests that buttress and illustrate the different points that are
considered here (for example, statistical significance and chi-squared
distribution). A second conclusion is that these units of contingency hedging
have undergone an evident process of decategorialisation: due to their
frequent use as markers of intersubjectivity, they have become considerably
fixed, syntactically speaking, even if the Dutch elements seem to show a more
flexible behaviour than their English and French counterparts.

The next paper is entitled “Cultural differences in academic discourse:
Evidence from first-person verb use in the methods sections of medical
research articles”. In it, Ian A. Williams makes use of comparable corpora, in
this case one composed of English texts, the other one of Spanish texts, which
together amount to 500,000, words with the aim of inspecting the stylistics of
first-person verbs occurring in the methodology sections of scientific
articles. The work consists of a quantitative and a qualitative side.
Regarding the former, the investigation shows that almost 50% of English and
Spanish articles use first person self-references. As for the latter, the
author pays attention to Sinclair’s (1996) four types of co-occurrence:
collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody. These
mechanisms allow Williams to show that the use of such self-references is
different in the two languages: while their purpose in English texts is to
justify the author’s choices when designing a study or experiment, the first
person in Spanish is used to bring the reader closer to the author of the
work. One interesting finding of this article is the fact that translation
plays an important role in how language is used in medical research articles,
in such a way that articles translated from English into Spanish usually
follow the stylistic trends of the L1 in aspects like the use of first person
self-reference.

The next chapter is “A contrastive analysis of English and French
argumentative discourse”, by Anita Fetzer and Marjut Johansson. In this case,
the authors concentrate on English and French political television debates
with the purpose of analysing the scope of action of the first person
self-references of the verbs ‘think’ and ‘believe’, and ‘penser’ and ‘croire’.
This discourse-based analysis is performed by consulting two comparable
corpora comprising 29 British political interviews and 26 French political
interviews, the former with c. 180,000 words, the latter with c. 119,000
words. As in Williams’ paper, we find a quantitative and a qualitative
approach to the issue. The quantitative data shows that ‘I think’ is the
favoured parenthetical in English, and ‘je crois’ is the preferred one for
French, which does not mean, however, that they occur with an identical
frequency as discourse connectives.– it is clear, as a token, that the
constructions under study occur more frequently in English than in French. The
qualitative-based method shows that ‘believe’ and ‘croire’ often carry a
“boosting function”, while ‘think’ and ‘penser’ may carry either a boosting or
an attenuating function. In addition, it is revealed that the two languages
display a marked preference for the connective ‘and’/‘et’. The examinations
and analyses in this chapter are interspersed with numerous examples from the
two corpora, which is appreciated given the fine-grained semantic-pragmatic
differences between some of the cases under discussion.

Also revolving around English and French is the article by Issa Kanté: “Mood
and modality in finite noun complement clauses”. The object of this
contribution is English and French finite noun complement clauses and their
relationship with modality. Kanté demonstrates that modality is an intrinsic
feature of the nouns that occur within ‘that’-clauses, thus acting as modal
stance markers. Once a solid theoretical background is provided, the paper’s
hypotheses are put forward and the data (from the BYU-BNC and the Frantext
corpora) is analysed. Particularly interesting is the study of the three
modality groups into which nouns are categorised: epistemic (e.g. assertion,
certainty, fact), alethic (e.g. likelihood, necessity, possibility) and
deontic (e.g. constraint, demand, requirement). In this section, the author
uses empirical data to underpin his claim that, in both English and French,
epistemic nouns tend to favour the indicative. The situation is different with
alethic and deontic nouns, since both types favour the subjective in French,
while alethic nouns tend to opt for the indicative and the latter choose the
subjunctive. The findings, furthermore, seem to support the idea that the
presence of some kind of modality is always found among the nouns governing
‘that’-clauses.

The volume closes with Aurelia Usoniene and Audrone Šoliene’s “Choice of
strategies in realisations of epistemic possibility in English and
Lithuanian”. This contribution pays attention to the process of formalisation
of epistemic possibility in these two languages, under the assumption that
English auxiliaries and adverbs will behave differently in this field of
modality than Lithuanian modals and adverbs. This includes units like ‘can,
could, may, might’ vs. ‘maybe, perhaps, possibly’ in English, and ‘galėti’
‘can/could/may/might’ vs. ‘gal, galgi, galbῡt, rasi, lyg ir’
‘maybe/perhaps/possibly’ in Lithuanian. The study makes use of two comparable
and parallel corpora derived from ParaCorpE-LT-E, a corpus made up of original
English and Lithuanian fictional texts and their translations into Lithuanian
and English, respectively. Among other results, this investigation points at a
preference for modal auxiliaries in the case of English, and a preference for
modal adverbials in the case of Lithuanian. Additionally, the analysis of
translational correspondences validates the hypotheses on features that are
different in original English and original Lithuanian. An asset of this paper
lies in the fact that it depicts and characterises the process of
grammaticalisation in the two languages studied, with English auxiliaries
displaying a higher degree of grammaticalisation than Lithuanian ones. This
also sheds light on the issue of translation equivalences in relation to
grammatical categories.

EVALUATION

This book is a welcome addition to the field of contrastive studies viewed
from the empirical side of corpus linguistics. The six contributions have the
common goal of providing a descriptive and theoretical insight into the
differences and similarities between languages, which they do by resorting to
a limited array of languages, namely Dutch, Spanish, Lithuanian and,
especially, French and English. In all cases, English serves as the tertium
comparationis. As has been observed, the volume covers several linguistic
domains (e.g. syntax, modality and discourse) and explores diverse types of
research questions (e.g. grammaticalisation, pragmatic functions, stylistic
functions and typological profile), which make it a varied and attractive
work. As is expected for a volume centred on corpus studies, the reader is
here provided with a substantial number of examples to empirically back up the
points under discussion, to the point that almost every hypothesis and
statement is checked against corpus records. This overwhelming amount of data
is accompanied by the interaction with statistical tests in order to endorse
the validity and authenticity of the experiments. Furthermore, the
investigations are carried out by using different types of corpora, and so it
is possible to find corpora of a contemporary and historical nature, written
and spoken, and embracing a range of text types. This is a positive aspect of
the book, restrained only by the reduced number of contributions in it.

If, as can be read in the editors’ introduction, one of their aims is “to
enhance the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy in this field”
(p. 2), this seems to be the right moment for this book. The shift that
contrastive studies are currently witnessing, where growing attention is being
paid to pragmatic and discourse processes, justifies a timely publication and
the inclusion of chapters devoted mainly to these two subfields of
linguistics, even if one wonders if articles belonging to spheres like
phonology or morphology could have joined the collection.

All in all, this is an attractive and readable volume that will hopefully
encourage future attempts in the subject of contrastive linguistics, for the
languages examined here and beyond. It will be of interest to scholars already
working in cross-linguistic areas of language, especially those with a focus
on pragmatics and discourse studies, but maybe not so much so to the
uninitiated in the field of contrastive linguistics.

REFERENCES

Gries, Stefan Th. & Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending collostructional
analysis: A corpus-based perspective on alternations. International Journal of
Corpus Linguistics 9(1). 97-129.

Noël, Dirk & Timothy Colleman. 2009. The nominative and infinitive in late
Modern English: A diachronic constructionist approach. Languages in Contrast
9(1). 144-181.

Sinclair, John. 1996. The search for units of meaning. Textus: English Studies
in Italy 9. 75-106.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jesús Fernández-Domínguez holds a PhD in English Linguistics and is currently
a lecturer at the University of Valencia, Spain. His research has mainly
focused on English word-formation and morphology, contrastive linguistics and
learner corpora, among other things.








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