New Approaches to Contrastive Linguistics

Empirical and Methodological Challenges

Renata Enghels, Bart Defrancq, Marlies Jansegers, Renata Enghels, Bart Defrancq, Marlies Jansegers

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110682670
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.

Comparing corrective constructions: Contrastive negation in parallel and monolingual data

Olli O. Silvennoinen

University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

Note: I wish to thank the following people for their help in a pilot study of this article: Pieter Claes, Andrei Călin Dumitrescu, Agata Dominowska, Lotta Jalava, Maarit Kallio, Katharina Ruuska, Ksenia Shagal and Max Wahlström. I also express my gratitude to Matti Miestamo, Minna Palander-Collin, Jouni Rostila and Johan van der Auwera as well as two anonymous referees for their comments on previous versions of this paper. All remaining mistakes are naturally my responsibility.

Abstract

This article is a quantitative study of contrastive negation in 11 European languages, using parallel and monolingual corpus data. Contrastive negation refers to expressions that combine a negated and an affirmed element so that the affirmed element replaces the negated one. In the languages being studied, there is typically a large number of constructions that fall under this definition. One of the ways of expressing contrastive negation is through a corrective conjunction (e.g. but in not once but twice). In this paper, constructions with a corrective conjunction are compared to other contrastive negation constructions by constructing a probabilistic semantic map on the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of parallel corpus data using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). The data comes from the Europarl corpus, which represents the proceedings of the European Parliament. The results suggest that in this discourse type, corrective conjunctions are associated with additive contrasts (e.g. not only once but twice), while constructions without an additive are mostly replacive (e.g. It’s not you, it’s me). However, some languages also display correctives that are more weakly or not at all associated with additivity. The results display an areal and genealogical core of Germanic languages and French, with the other Romance and the Finnic languages studied deviating from this core in various ways. The results are evaluated against monolingual corpus data from the Finnish component of the same corpus. Overall, the study suggests that parallel corpora are a promising source of data even for a grammatical domain in which the languages studied have seemingly analogous constructions.

Keywords: contrastive negation, corrective conjunctions, Europarl, multiple correspondence analysis, parallel corpus,

1 Introduction

Corpus data are increasingly used in cross-linguistic studies involving more than two languages. While even early typological studies made occasional use of corpora (Greenberg 1966), corpus-based cross-linguistic studies cannot be said to have taken off until the past two decades or so, largely because of the advent of readily usable parallel corpora (see e.g. Cysouw and Wälchli 2007; Aijmer 2008), i.e. corpora made up of translated texts aligned at the level of words, sentences or paragraphs. These have ranged from small-scale datasets comprising only a handful of languages to “massively parallel texts” (Cysouw and Wälchli 2007: 95) such as parts of the Bible, which exist in thousands of languages. An alternative to parallel corpora is comparable corpora, i.e. monolingual corpora of the same genre in different languages.

Both monolingual and parallel corpus data are used in this study to examine contrastive negation. Empirically, the goal of the paper is to achieve an account of how contrastive negation is expressed in 11 European national languages, belonging to the Germanic, Romance and Uralic groups. Methodologically, the goal is to see the extent to which parallel and monolingual data can be used to answer research questions and how monolingual corpus data can be used to validate (or disconfirm) the results of parallel corpus analysis.

Contrastive negation refers to expressions that combine a negat...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Reflections on the use of data and methods in contrastive linguistics
• A roadmap towards determining the universal status of semantic frames
• Quantitative methods for corpus-based contrastive linguistics
• On the usefulness of comparable and parallel corpora for contrastive linguistics. Testing the semantic stability hypothesis
• Is German more nominal than English? Evidence from a translation corpus
• Using data from simultaneous interpreting in contrastive linguistics
• WH-ever in German, Dutch and English: a contrastive study showcasing the ConverGENTiecorpus
• Comparing corrective constructions: Contrastive negation in parallel and monolingual data
• Contrasting semantic fields across languages