Translation corpora in contrastive research, translation and language learning

This article looks at the role of translation corpora in all fields of comparative language studies. Over the last decade, corpus linguistics has expanded into a new, powerful and easily accessible methodology, which has brought new impulses to many older sub-disciplines of linguistics. Thus, translation corpora have revitalised all comparative or cross-language studies, since they can be used profitably in contrastive linguistics and translation studies as well as in language teaching and learning. Translation corpus studies are particularly popular among non-native speakers of English, as they offer a sound basis for language analysis that does not depend on introspection. Because they combine a qualitative and a quantitative perspective, they are particularly interesting for gradient phenomena, like the auxiliary-catenative-full verb cline that provides the empirical test field in much of this contribution. The opportunities offered by translation corpora are illustrated using examples from the Chemnitz English-German translation corpus, mainly in three case studies of auxiliary help, catenative appear/seem, and modal may/might.O presente artigo analisa o papel de corpora de tradução em todos os âmbitos da pesquisa lingüística contrastiva. Na última década, a Lingüística de Corpus se transformou numa metodologia nova, poderosa e de fácil acesso, que impulsionou a maioria das disciplinas tradicionais da lingüística. Assim, os corpora de tradução revitalizaram todas as áreas de estudo comparativas, já que podem ser usados, com proveito tanto nos estudos lingüísticos contrastivos quanto na tradução e no ensino e aprendizado de língua. Estudos baseados em corpora de tradução são bastante difundidos entre os falantes não-nativos de inglês, uma vez que constituem uma fonte confiável para a análise da língua, que não depende da introspecção. Por agruparem uma perspectiva tanto quantitativa quanto qualitativa, são particularmente interessantes no caso de fenômenos que indicam gradação, como a escala verbo auxiliar-de ligação-pleno, que fornece o campo de teste empírico para a maior parte deste trabalho. As possibilidades oferecidas por corpora de tradução são ilustradas com o uso de exemplos extraídos do Corpus de Tradução Inglês-Alemão Chemnitz, que focalizam em especial três estudos de caso: o uso de help como auxiliar, os verbos de ligação appear/seem e o modal may/might

DCEP - Digital Corpus of the European Parliament

The paper presents a new highly multilingual sentence-aligned parallel corpus consisting of various document types and covering a wide range of subject domains. With a total of 1.37 billion words in 23 languages (253 language pairs), gathered in the course of ten years, this is the largest single release of documents by a European Union institution. Corpus statistics, required preprocessing, sentence alignment, and possible gains in statistical machine translation when adding this corpus to the previously existing ones are also considered.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Scholars and their metaphors: on Language Making in linguistics

This article deals with the powerful role of metaphors in the process of Language Making throughout the history of linguistics. It departs from the assumption that metaphors play an essential role both in the formation of scientific theories and in common conceptions of language. We want to illuminate to what extent metaphors are involved in language ideologies, and we investigate their role in linguistic theory formation. After introducing different approaches to metaphor theory, we show how metaphorization in linguistics can lead to biological, territorial and liquid concepts of language. Finally, we discuss the need for a re-evaluation of language concepts within the discipline

Semantic Role Labeling for Knowledge Graph Extraction from Text

This paper introduces TakeFive, a new semantic role labeling method that transforms a text into a frame-oriented knowledge graph. It performs dependency parsing, identifies the words that evoke lexical frames, locates the roles and fillers for each frame, runs coercion techniques, and formalizes the results as a knowledge graph. This formal representation complies with the frame semantics used in Framester, a factual-linguistic linked data resource. We tested our method on the WSJ section of the Peen Treebank annotated with VerbNet and PropBank labels and on the Brown corpus. The evaluation has been performed according to the CoNLL Shared Task on Joint Parsing of Syntactic and Semantic Dependencies. The obtained precision, recall, and F1 values indicate that TakeFive is competitive with other existing methods such as SEMAFOR, Pikes, PathLSTM, and FRED. We finally discuss how to combine TakeFive and FRED, obtaining higher values of precision, recall, and F1 measure