Using a Parallel Corpus to Validate Independent Claims

This paper examines the results from two corpus-based contrastive studies. Both studies offer cross-linguistic claims about the language pair English-Portuguese. We attempt to replicate the studies and check the findings against a different corpus, viz. the English—Portuguese part of the English—Norwegian Parallel Corpus, to see whether the regularities observed in the original corpora can be confirmed. After a brief presentation of each study, we describe how we gathered equivalent data, present our findings in the new corpus, and discuss some possible reasons for discrepancies in relation to the earlier studies. The topics investigated are boundary-crossing movement descriptions (after Slobin 1997) and perception verbs (after Santos 1998).