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In:Cross-linguistic Correspondences: From lexis to genre
Edited by Thomas Egan and Hildegunn Dirdal
[Studies in Language Companion Series 191] 2017
► pp. 75–96

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Chapter 3
Expressing place in children’s literature

Testing the limits of the n-gram method in contrastive linguistics

 | Charles University
 | Charles University
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.191.03cer
Abstract
Place, as one of the most basic semantic categories, plays an important role in children’s literature. This contrastive corpus-based study aims to examine and compare how place, in its widest sense, is expressed in children’s literature in English and Czech. The study is data driven and the main methodological approach taken is through n-gram extraction. At the same time, it aims to further test the method, which in previous applications in contrastive analysis has raised a number of methodological issues: while giving reassuring results when applied to typologically closer languages, it proves to be challenging in the study of typologically different languages, such as English and Czech. The second objective of this study is therefore to further address these issues and explore the potential of this methodology. The analysis is based on both comparable and parallel corpora: comparable corpora of English and Czech children’s literature and a parallel corpus of English children’s literature and its translations into Czech.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Children’s literature and its translation
  • 3.N-grams in corpus linguistics and contrastive studies
  • 4.N-grams in Czech and English children’s literature
  • 5.Data and methodology
  • 6.What does the English–Czech parallel corpus tell us?
    • 6.1Static frames
    • 6.2Dynamic frames
    • 6.3Extended frames
    • 6.4Translation solutions
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpus resources
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Corpus resources
The British National Corpus (version 2, BNC World). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Praha 2001. <[URL]>
SYN: Czech National Corpus – SYN (version 3). Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Praha. <[URL]>
InterCorp – English, Czech (version 7, version 8): Czech National Corpus, Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Praha. <[URL]>
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