The Choice of Corpora for Contrastive Analysis

Modern corpus-based contrastive studies brought attention to the choice of tertium comparationis in contrastive research. This problem can be overcome by using a bidirectional parallel corpus, although there are concerns about “translation eff ects” and the lack of proper tertium comparationis in parallel corpora. Corpus-based contrastive analysis of the English-Ukrainian language pair faces the challenge of the lack of representative parallel corpora since they are still in the process of development. The presented research showcases that two separate corpora (COCA and GRAC) can be used to harvest data, if there is a correct choice of tertium comparationis, refl ected in the query built. The research object is the causative construction with the non-fi nite complement, triggered with the complement taking predicate “encourage”, and its Ukrainian equivalent construction with “заохотити”. The parallel corpus ParaRook||EN→UK, nested in GRAC, is used as a complementary in this study. The theoretical background relies additionally on the insights from the Usage-Based Construction Grammar, following the assumption that grammar is shaped by the frequency of use. Key words: corpus-based contrastive analysis, tertium comparationis, causative construction, non-fi nite complement, Usage-Based Construction Grammar, usage frequency

Causative · Construction Grammar · Contrastive analysis · Grammar · Head-driven phrase structure grammar · Ukrainian · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity