Karin Aijmer
and Bengt Altenberg’s edited volume brings together twelve papers which
represent the state-of-the-art in corpus-based contrastive analysis.
Contrastive analysis, and corpus-based contrastive analysis in particular,
appear to be enjoying something of a revival, with the emphasis on ‘appear’:
the former has a long history and, from at least the nineties on, there is a
consistent line of enquiry evident in the literature relating to the latter.
This volume is based on a workshop on ‘corpus-based contrastive analysis’
convened during the 2011 ICAME conference and, like the conference, in honour
of Stig Johansson. Within the twelve individual papers by twenty-two
international contributors that make up this volume, Dutch, English, French,
German, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish are discussed. It will be of use to the
reader interested more broadly in how this ‘conversation’ between different
disciplinary paradigms and corpus methodology is developing, as well as its
primary audience: readers interested in contrastive linguistics (corpus-based
or otherwise), translation studies and foreign language pedagogy.