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Description:
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The papers brought together in this volume explore, through corpus data,
the link between contrastive and interlanguage analysis. Learner corpora
are approached from a contrastive perspective, by comparing them with
native corpora or corpus data produced by learners from other mother tongue
backgrounds, or by combining them with contrastive data from multilingual
(translation or comparable) corpora. The integration of these two
frameworks, contrastive and learner corpus research, makes it possible to
highlight crucial aspects of learner production, such as features of
non-nativeness (errors, over- and underuse, unidiomatic expressions),
including universal features of interlanguage, or more general issues like
the question of transfer. The ten papers of this volume cover topics
ranging from methodology to syntax (e.g. adverb placement, postverbal
subjects), through lexis (collocations) and discourse (e.g. information
packaging, thematic choice). The languages examined include English,
Chinese, Dutch, French and Spanish. The book will be of interest to a wide
array of readers, especially researchers in second language acquisition and
contrastive linguistics, but also professionals working in foreign language
teaching, such as language teachers, materials writers and language testers.
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