Böcker av Anna Cermakova

Marking 30 years of contrastive corpus linguistics, this volume provides a state-of-the-art of the field, charting its development over time and expanding the boundaries of the discipline. Focusing on a diversity of methods and approaches to language comparison, it uses both comparable and translation corpora, and explores a broad range of language registers from newspaper reporting and spoken political discourse to film scripts and football match reports. Using English as the pivot language for each chapter, the volume offers contrastive bilingual and trilingual perspectives on a number of languages, including Czech, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish, covering a typologically diverse field. By exploring the application of complex multi-genre multilingual data sets and expanding the horizons of contrastive studies, it demonstrates how a juxtaposition of cross-linguistic and register variation can deepen our insight into language variation and use.The volume is dedicated to two prominent contrastive corpus linguists: Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, who have decisively shaped the discipline from its very beginnings. The book opens with a chapter by Aijmer, reflecting on the current breadth and future prospects of research in the area while pointing to emergent trends with an insight that only she can offer.

Children's fiction reflects social values and stereotypes, and it shapes what children learn about the world. Providing an interdisciplinary perspective on children's fiction and childhood, this book offers a fresh insight into the key issues in fiction for children, such as gender, social stereotypes, embodied and spatial experience, and emotions. Connecting classic children's texts such as Alice in Wonderland with contemporary fiction including Harry Potter, the book innovatively brings together perspectives from corpus linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and human geography. Chapter authors also include a novelist and a creative practitioner. Divided into two parts - Experiencing Texts, and Fiction and the Real World - the book highlights the important link between fictional stories and real life, and explores a range of approaches to experiencing texts, including a cross-linguistic view through translation and corpus linguistic methods for the study of literary texts. The materiality of texts is also investigated, including the spaces they take up in libraries, their cultural history moulded through performances, and the different reading environments that shape childhood, such as fashion and urban spaces. Connecting academic research with texts of cultural currency, the book casts light on the role of literature in how children construct the world around them.