Harry Potter meets Le petit prince – On the usefulness of parallel corpora in crosslinguistic investigations

Thomas Stolz

doi:10.1524/stuf.2007.60.2.100

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Harry Potter meets Le petit prince – On the usefulness of parallel corpora in crosslinguistic investigations

Thomas Stolz

Published/Copyright: September 25, 2009

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From the journal Language Typology and Universals Volume 60 Issue 2

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.

Keywords: corpus; parallel texts; literary sources; methodology

Published Online: 2009-09-25

Published in Print: 2007-07

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2007.60.2.100

Keywords for this article

corpus; parallel texts; literary sources; methodology