Abstract
This paper highlights the importance of a common ground, or tertium comparationis, in order to establish unbiased cross-linguistic equivalence in contrastive studies. Following an outline of the two main types of corpora used in contrastive analysis—comparable and parallel bidirectional—a discussion of how they relate to different tertia comparationis is presented. This is further illustrated in a case study where the same phenomenon is investigated based on the two types of corpora. It is concluded that a bidirectional parallel corpus, relying on both comparable monolingual and bidirectional translation data, may yield more robust insights into cross-linguistic matters than either of the two on their own.
Highlights
This paper addresses one of the main challenges within the field of contrastive lingusitics, namely equivalence, through a direct comparison of two types of tertia comparationis
That form, or surface structure, alone is a poor basis for comparison if the aim is to study meaning and/or function is acknowledged by Biber (1995) in a contrastive study of relative constructions, where he notes that “despite the obvious structural similarities between relative constructions in Somali and English, the distribution of these features indicates that they are serving very different functions in the two languages” (Biber 1995: 75)
Ebeling & Ebeling (2014) present a corpus-based contrastive analysis of two similar-looking patterns in English and Norwegian, namely for * sake and for * skyld, where the asterisk stands for a genitive noun
Summary
This paper addresses one of the main challenges within the field of contrastive lingusitics, namely equivalence, through a direct comparison of two types of tertia comparationis. One could start more opportunistically by choosing a word, frame, pattern or construction in language A and record and analyse all the corresponding items/units in language B, i.e. create a list of translation paradigms, to describe similarities and differences at the levels of, for instance, syntax and/or semantics (e.g. Johansson 2001 on seem and its Norwegian correspondences) In all of these cases, close, qualitative scrutiny of the differences should be part of the study. Corpus-based contrastive research between English and Norwegian and between English and Swedish has often been conducted on the basis of a balanced, bidirectional, parallel corpus, since, in addition to being comparable, such a corpus gives the researchers the possibility of starting the analysis in either language and in either original or translated texts and, more importantly, to control for translation effects and source language shining through (Johansson 2007; Teich 2003)..
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