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Thomas Stolz
Harry Potter meets Le petit prince – On the usefulness of parallel corpora in crosslinguistic investigations
Keywords: corpus, parallel texts, literary sources, methodology
This paper documents some of the experiences I have made in the course of my (areal) typological research projects. The empirical basis of these projects stems from the analysis of two large parallel literary corpora. The texts involved are original and translations of ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY′s Le petit prince and JOANNE ROWLING′s Harry Potter series. The paper addresses a selection of issues touching upon methodo-logical, theoretical and practical problems of this kind of corpus-based linguistic research. Parallel corpora offer interesting possibilities for typological research. However, working with parallel literary corpora often imposes severe restrictions upon sample size and sample composition as there is a clear European bias in terms of available translations.
STUF – Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, Akademie Verlag
Print ISSN: 0942-2919
Volume: 60, 02/2007
Pages: 100 - 117