Languages in contrast: Papers from a symposium on text-based cross-linguistic studies Ed. by Karin Aumer, Bengt Altenberg, and Mats Johansson (review)

Abstract

238 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) students to experience a real text and to come to their own conclusions about stylistic effects without being told what to look for. That is, the book is arranged so that students learn about a grammatical structure —what it is and how to identify it—and then they are asked to analyze how it functions in a passage instead of being told about particular styles and trying to account for them. This approach, I believe, leads students to a greater awareness of the structures and devices used to create certain styles. Another strength is that the texts provided for each task can be used with any of the other tasks. Instructors can easily skip around in the book depending on the level of their students. So too can the topics be used in any order. Even though the book is designed to be progressively complex, the tasks are basically the same throughout; only the structure or device to be identified and analyzed changes. Even as well organized and practical as this coursebook is, one should be ready to supplement it in the classroom. The authors state that the book is intended for a literary-linguistic audience (xiv), but some of the definitions and solutions may need more detail. For example, the book begins with a detailed examination of the noun phrase, but students with little background in grammar could become confused by the definition of an adjective as fitting between a determiner and a noun (without determiners yet defined), and then in the next sentence, the word 'vaguely' is called an adverb even though it is between a determiner and a noun—it is modifying an adjective (6). Later, when explaining the effect of the placement of adverbial elements, the authors discuss cohesion and coherence—terms not defined until the next chapter (124). Some knowledge is assumed, as the authors state in the introduction (xiv); instructors will need to be aware of their students' level of knowledge. AU in all, this coursebook is well-organized and detailed; it provides many useful examples and tasks and allows for real, hands-on experience for students. [Lynn Burley, Purdue University.] Languages in contrast: Papers from a symposium on text-based cross-linguistic studies. Ed. by Karin Aumer, Bengt Altenberg, and Mats Johansson . (Lund studies in English 88.) Lund: Lund University Press, 1996. Pp. 200. The ten papers in this volume explore the use of computerized bilingual text corpora for cross-linguistic research. The first two approach contrastive corpus linguistics from an applied perspective. Kari Saja?aara ('New challenges for contrastive analysis ', 17-36) advocates experimental and qualitative research into the production and reception of languages while SYLviane Granger ('From CA to CIA and back: An integrated approach to computerized bilingual and learner corpora', 37-51) demonstrates how a combined parallel/translation corpus of English and French newspaper texts can improve earlier , more intuitive accounts of word formation in the two languages. Other papers are more theoretical, concerned either with translated or with 'parallel' texts in two languages, matched in terms of type and genre. In a large scale statistical comparison oforiginal Swedish novels and novels translated from English, Martin Gellerstam ('Translations as a source for cross-linguistic studies', 53-62) uncovers a range of linguistic features overused in translation. Instances of 'translationese' are also discussed by Karen M. Lauridsen ('Text corpora and contrastive linguistics : Which type of corpus for which type of analysis ?', 63-71) with particular reference to the parallel text corpora at the Aarhus School of Business in the fields of contract law and genetic engineering. Remaining papers offer accounts of work in progress on bilingual corpora in Norway and Sweden . Outlined by the editors ('Text-based contrastive studies in English. Presentation of a project', 73-85), the University of Lund project is shown to focus on three areas of research—epistemic modality, discourse linking, and grammatical focusing devices. Mats Johansson is also the author of another paper ('Contrastive data as a resource in the study of English clefts', 127-50) which examines shared semantic/pragmatic features of cleft and pseudocleft constructions, drawing on data from the EnglishSwedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). Texts from the...