为了促进我校语料库语言学学科的发展，特邀请英国伯明翰大学Wolfgang Teubert 教授和北京外国语大学许家金教授于2017年5月3--4日在天津科技大学外国语学院举行4场学术讲座, 内容涵盖语料库语言学的理论问题（语料库驱动方法的构建：意义的更广阔视角、美国语料库语言学的技术创新与理论困境）、语料库研究的前沿问题、语料库语言学和翻译对等。欢迎我校及兄弟院校的广大师生参加。
联系人：王艳艳 (wangyanyan@tust.edu.cn) Prof . Wolfgang Teubert 英国伯明翰大学 5.3 (周三)： 15:30--17:10 F405 Corpus linguistics and translation equivalence 5.4 (周四): 9:00-11:00 F405 New frontiers in corpus research 5.4 (周四) ： 14:00--15:00 C区报告厅 Building onto the corpus-driven approach: a wider look on meaning
Prof. Xu Jiajin 许家金教授 北京外国语大学 5.4 (周四) ： 15:00--16:00 C区报告厅 Lessons from American Corpus Linguistics: A technological leader and theoretical underachiever美国语料库语言学的技术创新与理论困境
Wolfgang Teubert
New frontiers in corpus research
An analysis of the articles published over the last three years in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (IJCL) reveals that the remit of corpus linguistics has not undergone any drastic change. New tools relying on quantitative data and statisticsare still being developed. Over the last years, there seems to be a gradual decline in work on corpus analysis for teaching and learning foreign languages (e.g. learner corpora). But studies in (conceptual) metaphor theory seem to rely more and more on corpus research. To my regret, studies of meaning are still scarce; the notion of the meaning of arbitrary signs, so central to human language would, I believe, demand more attention. Instead, there is still much research on language variation distinguishing discourse types.
On the other hand, there are interesting new contributions to the study of parallel corpora. What is new is that larger corpora of sign language are being assembled and wait to be annotated to make them searchable. Unfortunately, the increasing application of corpus methodology to discourse analysis is not reflected in the IJCL, but is easily visible by a look at the relevant journals. An emerging topic is the analysis of blogs and comparable facets of the new social networks. However it seems the IJCL is traditional in the sense that its focus remains on corpus linguistics proper than on the application of its rationale and its methods to new lines of language and discourse studies.
While English is still the language under research in most articles, other (mostly European) languages are making inroads. It seems the number of Chinese contributors is on the increase, but there is still a noticeable lack of Chinese language studies.
Corpus linguistics and translation equivalence
Parallel corpora provide an insight into the notion of translation. What is translated is, of course, not the form but the content of a source text. But what is meaning, and where do we find it in language? Words or other units of meaning are not ‘real’ items; they are contingent, arbitrary concepts allowing us, language users and linguists, to make sense of texts or text segments.
While the unit of meaning is a monolingual concept, it sometimes differs from the unit that is translated into the target language. This is because the realities constructed in source language and target language tend to differ. Therefore we need the notion of a translation unit (that which is translated as a whole) and the translation equivalent (as what it appears in the target language). This is true for human as well as for machine translation (MT). Parallel corpora have improved MT a lot over recent years, but human translation, too, has profited from tools based on them. What MT can do these days I will show by two translations/back-translations of the University of Birmingham mission statement into Chinese. I will use examples taken from the Linguee website to demonstrate how access to parallel corpora can help us to identify the translation units and their target language.
Building onto the corpus-driven approach: a wider look on meaning
What makes the corpus-driven approach stand out in language studies is its appeal as a ‘scientific’ methodology. Using computational tools to identify, count and measure real language data, we obtain dependable findings. Scientific practice, however, is no different from any other social practice: it is discursively constructed. In the absence of a ‘real’ fundament, there cannot be a ‘true’ bottom-up approach. All corpus research presupposes a consensus on the arbitrary decisions underlying our research question, and the findings obtained have to be interpreted to make sense.
Meaning is found only in discourse. In my investigation of the discourse object ‘human rights,’ I will move from ambiguous collocation profiles to what texts actually say about this object by assigning a meaning to this lexical item. The meaning of human rights is, as I see it, the entirety of what is said about this lexical item, i.e. of all the paraphrases we find in discourse. Yet what counts a paraphrase is a matter of interpretation. The corpus-driven approach offers candidates we can accept or reject. The study of paraphrastic content is thus a necessary extension of traditional corpus linguistics. It combines a methodological approach with an interpretive endeavour that is free from methodical constraints.
In order to make sense of human rights in a specific text, or text segment, we have to uncover its intertextual links, thus revealing how it differs from what has been said before. We will not understand what human rights means in a specific context unless we have analysed those links. Texts thus can be seen as the nodes of dynamic, diachronically evolving networks held together by intertextual links. Therefore corpus linguistics has to concern itself with the diachronic dimension of discourse if it is to pave the way for interpreting what a given text (segment) or a lexical item means. Again, there is no method to capture intertextuality – it is up to the arbitrary decisions of an interpretive community.
Language is not a natural phenomenon; it is a cultural artefact. Linguistics, including the corpus-driven approach, belongs to the human sciences.
个人简介:
Wolfgang Teubert was the Chair in Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham from 2000 to 2015. Before that he was Senior Fellow at the Institute for German Language in Mannheim, responsible for corpus research in the framework of European co-operation. Now he is fully retired. His aim is to show how hermeneutics (i.e. the art and craft of interpretation) can become the theoretical foundation of a theory of meaning for corpus linguistics and discourse analusis. He has also developed a keen interest in the role language played for classical Chinese philosophy, in Confucian and Daoist texts, and in the Zhuangzi in particular.
Topic: Lessons from American Corpus Linguistics: A technological leader and theoretical underachiever
Abstract: It is commonly acknowledged that Corpus Linguistics has been thriving mainly in England and the European continent. Corpus Linguistics in the US has somehow been overlooked, if not downplayed. The stereotypical under-achiever profile of American Corpus Linguistics, however, has been overturned at times when researchers refer to the Brown Corpus (1967), Douglas Biber’s multi-dimensional analysis (1988), the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) corpus, and the multi-factorial analysis championed by Stefan Gries (2003) at UCSB. Unlike the Corpus Linguistics story in Britain, theoretical parallel has hardly been observed alongside the technological innovation in the US. An important lesson from American corpus linguistics is that the name of the discipline will not be justified if we keep corpus research as technology and methodology alone.
Short bio
Jiajin Xu is Professor of Linguistics at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University as well as secretary general of the Corpus Linguistics Society of China (CLSC). He is co-editor of Yuliaoku Yuyanxue (Corpus Linguistics) journal, and has been a referee for some leading Corpus Linguistics journals like International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Corpora and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. His research interests include discourse studies, second language acquisition, contrastive linguistics and translation studies, and corpus linguistics. He has published a number of English papers in international journals and over 30 papers in high-impact linguistics journals in China. 题目：美国语料库语言学的技术创新与理论困境
许家金个人简介
北京外国语大学中国外语与教育研究中心专职研究员、教授、博士生导师。中国语料库语言学研究会秘书长。《语料库语言学》杂志主编之一。International Journal of Corpus Linguistics等国际期刊审稿人。教育部“新世纪优秀人才”。主持国家社科基金及教育部人文社科等多项省部级课题。发表SSCI及CSSCI来源期刊论文30余篇。主要研究兴趣为：话语分析、二语习得、语言对比与翻译、语料库语言学。