How can linguists profit from parallel corpora?

Abstract

This paper starts by discussing the reasons why linguists should be interested in parallel corpora. I outline the questions that parallel corpora enable us to ask, and relate them to traditional questions in linguistics and translation theory. The paper then suggests a method for arriving at answers to some of these questions. The proposed method builds on the notion of 'modulation' from Vinay & Darbelnet (1958) and attempts to put this notion on a sounder theoretical and empirical basis. It also includes a method of sharing data from different language pairs in a 'Contrastive Linguistic Database'.