Considering bilingual dictionaries against a corpus. Do English-French dictionaries present "real English"?

This article investigates the extent to which four representatives of the latest generation of English-French / French-English dictionaries present "real English", i.e. actually used meanings of actually used English word patterns. The findings of a corpus study of the verb CONSIDER are confronted with the entries for this verb in the English-French sections of these dictionaries, leading to the conclusion that there are important gaps in both the semantics and the lexicogrammar they cover, and that the organization of entries does not match the corpus frequency data. Corpus research could help to fill the gaps and should therefore be taken seriously by compilers of bilingual dictionaries.Keywords: lexicography, bilingual dictionaries, corpus research, contrastive grammar, verb valency

Learner Corpus Research Meets Chinese as a Second Language Acquisition: Achievements and Challenges

The article sheds light on Chinese Learner Corpus Research (CLCR), emphasizing advances and lacks in this field. First, the paper describes the potentials of learner corpora in the investigation of learner language. The specificity of learner corpus data compared to learner data in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies will be also analyzed. Second, it provides an overview of Chinese learner corpus-based research and reviews existing L2 Chinese learner corpora. The paper highlights the lack of L2 Chinese learner corpora collecting data from Italian learners and discuss the challenges and the needs of compiling L2 Chinese corpora to conduct studies on the acquisition of L2 Chinese by learners whose L1 is other than English or an Asian language. This issue is addressed by taking into account recent projects integrating the LCR methodology with L2 Chinese studies for Italian-speaking learners. Finally, the paper encourages a concrete integration between the application of the methodological framework of LCR and the implementation of the theoretical interpretation of data of SLA research in the design of Chinese acquisitional studies

Contrastive Corpus Research in Bilingual Phraseography

The paper discusses linguistic issues presenting difficulties for bilingual lexicography. The purpose of the study is to use data of parallel English and Russian corpora for description of non-trivial features of English phraseological constructions on the brink of / on the threshold of in comparison with their Russian equivalents на Ðрани / на пороÐе in the process of compiling of an English-Russian phraseological dictionary. Some ideas of construction grammar are applied as theoretical basis of this research work. The analysis of usage frequency of phraseological constructions applying statistical methods is put forward in this work. The results of the study show that the use of parallel corpora helps to reveal specific character of their functional correlations and non-trivial semantic preferences of English phraseological constructions which do not have standard Russian equivalences. The need for a new dictionary is motivated by the fact that at present there are no English-Russian phraseological dictionaries based on corpora and authentic data in international lexicography. The use of corpora helps to provide new vision of a contextual behavior of phraseological constructions and restrictions of their usage, which is very important for the purposes of lexicographic description

Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study

One area in language and gender research that has so far received only little attention is the extent to which the sexes make use of what recent corpus research has termed “conversational grammar.” The author’s initial findings have suggested that the majority of features distinctive of conversational grammar may be used predominantly by female speakers. This article reports on a study designed to test the hypothesis that conversational grammar is “feminine grammar” in the sense that women’s conversational language is more adapted to the conversational situation than men’s. Based on data from the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus and following the situational framework for the description of conversational features elaborated in the author’s previous research, features distinctive of conversational grammar are grouped into five functional categories and their normed frequencies compared across the sexes. The functional categories distinguish features that can be seen as adaptations to constraints set by the situational factors of (1) Shared Context, (2) Co-Construction, (3) Real-Time Processing, (4) Discourse Management, and (5) Relation Management. The study’s results, described in detail in relation to the biological category of speaker sex and cultural notions of gender, suggest that the feminine grammar hypothesis is valid