About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Functional and Corpus Perspectives in Contrastive Discourse Analysis
Maite Taboada, Susana Doval Suárez and Elsa González Álvarez
1. Discourse Markers and Coherence Relations: Comparison across Markers, Languages and Modalities
Maite Taboada and María de los Ángeles Gómez González, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain
2. Pragmatic Triangulation and Misunderstanding: A Prosodic Perspective
Jesús Romero-Trillo, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
3. Spanish venga and its English Equivalents: A Contrastive Study of Teenage Talk
Anna-Britta Stenström, University of Bergen, Norway
4. Discourse Markers in French and German: Reasons for an Asymmetry
Séverine Adam and Martine Dalmas, Université Paris-Sorbonne, France
5. Thematic Parentheticals in Dutch and English
Mike Hannay, VU University Amsterdam, and María de los Ángeles Gómez González
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 Suárez and Elsa González Álvarez
8. Annotating Thematic Features in English and Spanish: A Contrastive Corpus-based Study
Jorge Arús Hita, Julia Lavid and Lara Moratón, 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, Universität 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
About the Author :
Maite Taboada is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She is the author of Building Coherence and Cohesion: Task-Oriented Dialogue in English and Spanish (John Benjamins, 2004). Susana Doval Suarez is a tenured Lecturer in the Department of English Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She is the author (with C.S. Butler) of The Dynamics of Language Use: Functional and Contrastive Perspectives (John Benjamins, 2005). Elsa Gonzalez Alvarez is a tenured Lecturer in the Department of English Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She is the author of Interlanguage Lexical Innovation (Lincom Europa, 2004), the editor (with M.A. Gomez Gonzalez and L. MacKenzie) of Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives (John Benjamins, 2008) and Languages and Cultures in Contrast and Comparison (John Benjamins, 2008).
Review :
A rich collection of papers, illustrating various approaches in contrastive linguistics. The specific attention paid to register and genre analysis and to learner data puts the collection at the forefront of modern corpus linguistics.
Languages in Contrast
This volume is an excellent choice for researchers needing an overview of recent research trends in contrastive discourse analysis. An understanding of the diverse theoretical perspectives discussed in this volume provides excellent background knowledge for understanding how contrastive discourse analysis is defined and why certain research methods are used in empirical studies.
Discourse Studies
The present volume is, all in all, a very valuable and original piece of work for two main reasons: first, because the diversity of European languages dealt
with in the book (Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and English, of course), together with the variety of methodological strategies (ranging from concordancing and careful annotation to painstaking qualitative analysis) used to analyse the different discourse phenomena dealt with, show that the contrastive analysis of languages can be approached from very different angles. And second, because, due to the preliminary character of almost all its chapters, it opens some interesting new lines of research within the field of Contrastive Linguistics. Notice at this point that it revolves around very diverse discourse issues from corpus and functional perspectives which up to now have been almost completely disregarded within the contrastive linguistic tradition, thus calling for further contrastive studies of this type.
Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies
