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In this paper, we will look at some features of the person reference system in Catalan and Spanish. At first sight, both languages seem rather similar: both are Romance languages and they share a number of features at various levels of linguistic analysis, among which their pro-drop character is the most relevant for our research. Furthermore, most speakers of Catalan are also fairly proficient speakers of Spanish, which could lead to interference between both languages. Nevertheless, we will show that, at least in certain types of discourse, Catalan and Spanish speakers tend to use person reference devices in different ways. We will therefore analyse a parallel corpus, consisting of the transcriptions of the 2005 State of the Union debate in the Catalan resp. Spanish parliament. This debate is a major issue in politics and media. It is particularly adequate for the comparison of a multiparty debate in both languages, about a similar topic and with similar participants (the participants have similar roles and both parliaments had a comparable political configuration at the time). Thus, the remaining variables that can influence the use of person reference devices, are the language used and the pragmatic-discursive specificities of each debate tradition. The research questions are the following. Since both Catalan and Spanish are pro-drop languages, we will look at the distribution of explicit subject pronouns in each language. Special attention will be paid to first and second person forms, since those forms are most clearly linked to the participants in the interaction. These data will be compared with the distribution of explicit subject pronouns in more general corpora for Catalan and Spanish. Thus, we will combine a contrastive analysis of both languages with a genre-based analysis for each language separately. This comparison allows us to put into perspective the representativity of political discourse for a wider array of language use. This distributional analysis is necessary in order to proceed to the second research question, which consists of a qualitative analysis of the explicit subject pronouns in first and second person. We will therefore look at the distribution of explicit pronouns according to the discursive functions of the utterances in which they occur, e.g. text-structuring, hedging, speaker commitment expression. It is our hypothesis that there is a functional divergence between explicit subject pronouns in Catalan and in Spanish. The combination of these two research questions will shed light on the pragmatics of person reference in Catalan and Spanish parliamentary debate. The comparison with general corpora for both languages enables us to point at more substantial differences of the distribution and pragmatics of both person reference systems.

In this paper, we will look at some features of the person reference system in Catalan and Spanish. At first sight, both languages seem rather similar: both are Romance languages and they share a number of features at various levels of linguistic analysis, among which their pro-drop character is the most relevant for our research. Furthermore, most speakers of Catalan are also fairly proficient speakers of Spanish, which could lead to interference between both languages. Nevertheless, we will show that, at least in certain types of discourse, Catalan and Spanish speakers tend to use person reference devices in different ways. We will therefore analyse a parallel corpus, consisting of the transcriptions of the 2005 State of the Union debate in the Catalan resp. Spanish parliament. This debate is a major issue in politics and media. It is particularly adequate for the comparison of a multiparty debate in both languages, about a similar topic and with similar participants (the participants have similar roles and both parliaments had a comparable political configuration at the time). Thus, the remaining variables that can influence the use of person reference devices, are the language used and the pragmatic-discursive specificities of each debate tradition. The research questions are the following. Since both Catalan and Spanish are pro-drop languages, we will look at the distribution of explicit subject pronouns in each language. Special attention will be paid to first and second person forms, since those forms are most clearly linked to the participants in the interaction. These data will be compared with the distribution of explicit subject pronouns in more general corpora for Catalan and Spanish. Thus, we will combine a contrastive analysis of both languages with a genre-based analysis for each language separately. This comparison allows us to put into perspective the representativity of political discourse for a wider array of language use. This distributional analysis is necessary in order to proceed to the second research question, which consists of a qualitative analysis of the explicit subject pronouns in first and second person. We will therefore look at the distribution of explicit pronouns according to the discursive functions of the utterances in which they occur, e.g. text-structuring, hedging, speaker commitment expression. It is our hypothesis that there is a functional divergence between explicit subject pronouns in Catalan and in Spanish. The combination of these two research questions will shed light on the pragmatics of person reference in Catalan and Spanish parliamentary debate. The comparison with general corpora for both languages enables us to point at more substantial differences of the distribution and pragmatics of both person reference systems.

The article specifies the place of contrastive linguistics in linguistic
research, how it is different from the other linguistic disciplines based on language
comparison: comparative-historical linguistics, translation studies and typology. In
particular, the author comments on one of the main concepts of contrastive linguistics
formulated by A.A. Reformatsky: when comparing facts of language, one must study those descriptive categories in which these facts are presented in each of the languages.
Using a number of examples of Russian (conjunctions a to, prichem and the
preposition krome), the author shows that comparing languages can lead to a revision
of the categorial apparatus in a particular grammar area of one of them. This becomes
possible due to the development of new contrastive analysis methods, for instance,
unidirectional and bidirectional analysis. Thus, contrastive linguistics can solve not
only practical problems, mostly related to foreign languages teaching, but also
contribute to theoretical language description.

The article focuses on contemporary trends in contrastive studies. As a point of departure the nature, history and evolution of contrastive linguistics are examined. Contrastive linguistics is viewed in relation to other disciplines such as comparative linguistics, comparative historical linguistics, linguistic typology, theory of translation, and foreign language teaching. Any aspect of language may be covered in cross-linguistic studies which involve a systematic comparison of two or more languages both at micro-linguistic and macro-linguistic level. The current trends are identified in terms of macro-linguistic widening of contrastive analysis which is applied in studies of specialized discourses such as media, political and academic communication. The findings are based on a small-scale research of contrastive studies published in Contrastive Linguistics, the oldest international journal for contrastive linguistics. By conducting quantitative and qualitative analysis and employing a diachronic approach conclusions are drawn about the need for the contrastive approach at macro-level, the type of linguistic phenomena studied and the preferred methods of contrastive analysis within a period of forty-six years. The findings show that there is only a slight increase in macro-linguistic analyses in recent years, but contrastive analysis remains a vibrant area of research with a potential for development at discourse level in particular and implications for intercultural understanding and tolerance.

This book brings together a collection of articles characterized by two main themes: the contrastive study of parallel phenomena in two or more languages, and an essentially functional approach in which language is regarded, first and foremost, as a rich and complex communication system, inextricably embedded in sociocultural and psychological contexts of use. The majority of the studies reported is empirical in nature, many making use of corpora or other textual materials in the language(s) under investigation. The book begins with an introductory section in which the editors provide surveys.

Douglas Biber's new book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in his ground breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing (CUP 1988). In Dimensions of Register Variation he gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely differing languages: English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali. Using the multi-dimensional analytical framework employed in his earlier work, Biber carries out a principled comparison of both synchronic and diachronic patterns of variation across the four languages. Striking similarities as well as differences emerge, allowing Biber to predict for the first time cross-linguistic universals of register variation. This major new work will provide the foundation for the further investigation of cross-linguistic universals governing the pattern of discourse variation across registers, and will be of wide interest to any scholar interested in style, register and literacy

The paper describes the history of creation and development of the
international group of linguists conducting research in contrastive text linguistics
Groupe d'études en linguistique textuelle contrastive (GeLiTeС). Its coordination
center and site are located at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). Th e languages
of the texts under study are Romanсe and Slavic. Th e goals of this scientific association are outlined, as well as its composition, its shared concept of language allowing
for the variety of theoretical frameworks and methods, the general fi eld and the main
topics of research: contrastive analysis of discourse practices, discourse functions
of grammatical categories, connectors and other means of text cohesion. The paper
also presents key activities of GeLiTeC, including regular conferences and joint
publications. The References list all the collections of papers published by GeLiTeC,
including special issues of journals.

This presentation reports on an exploratory, corpus-driven study of French and Spanish stance expressions in debates held at the European Parliament. Stance is here understood as "the speaker's evaluative, epistemic or affective positioning towards a stance object" (Kärkkäinen 2012: 2195). More specifically, our paper focuses on recurrent multi-word stance expressions, such as French à mon avis 'in my opinion', il me semble + ADJ + de 'it seems + ADJ + to', il est essentiel de 'it is essential to' and Spanish yo creo que 'I believe that', me gustaría 'I would like to', es necesario 'it is necessary', and takes stocks of insights from both contrastive pragmatics (Aijmer 2011) and contrastive phraseology (Ebeling & Oksefjell Ebeling 2013, Granger 2014). Our study relies on comparable Europarl subcorpora of European parliamentary proceedings in French and Spanish (see Koehn 2005), corresponding to approximately 10 years of debates (up to 2010) and 3 million tokens per language. The subcorpora used in this study are restricted to verbatim reports of speeches originally delivered in French and Spanish by Members of Parliament (see Cartoni & Meyer's directional version of Europarl, which relies on Europarl's language tag). In other words, they do not contain any translated texts. Even though it must be acknowledged that French and Spanish are occasionally used by non-native speakers in the European Parliament, in the vast majority of cases, the two languages are used by Members of Parliament from France, French-speaking Belgium and Spain, respectively. In this paper, we adopt a corpus-driven approach to stance. The stance data were obtained by automatically extracting n-grams (also called 'lexical bundles'), which are recurrent sequences of n contiguous words, i.e. "sequences of word forms that commonly go together in natural discourse" (Biber et al. 1999: 90). As pointed out by Granger (2014: 69), n-grams "are a powerful window onto pragmatics and rhetoric. It is undeniably a quick-and-dirty method, but one that has great heuristic power: it generates a multitude of word sequences that have so far received very little interest in the contrastive literature". In this study, we have extracted 2- to 5-grams with a minimum frequency of 50 occurrences per million words. The automatically retrieved n-grams were then manually analyzed in context so as to identify stance expressions and patterns. Methodologically, the comparative analysis of French and Spanish, which are arguably quite close, being two Romance languages, raises a number of issues. One of them is that Spanish is a pro-drop language, while French is not. As a result, Spanish stance expressions containing a conjugated verb form may either be 1- or 2-grams, depending on the optional overt expression of the subject (e.g. (yo) creo 'I believe', (nosotros) pensamos 'we think'), while in French, corresponding expressions typically contain two words (je crois 'I believe', nous pensons 'we think'). In order to ensure an optimal cross-linguistic comparability of the datasets analyzed, a number of additional single-word stance expressions corresponding to the multi-word sequences identified through the n-gram approach were also extracted (e.g. lamento/je regrette 'I regret', desearía/je souhaiterais 'I would like to'). The presentation of the results will proceed in three steps. First, we will provide a structured, contrastive overview of the hundreds of stance expressions uncovered through the n-gram approach adopted in this paper, paying special attention to well-known French-Spanish morphosyntactic contrasts, such as the compulsory subject expression in French vs. the pro-drop character of Spanish, and the wider use of verbs with an experiencer dative in Spanish (e.g. me gustaría decir 'I would like to say'; cf. Vázquez Rozas 2016). Second, we will zoom in on the different uses of formally similar or cognate forms, such as croire/creer 'believe' and penser/pensar 'think'. Indeed, as repeatedly shown in studies on French and English political interviews (Fetzer & Johansson 2010), English and Spanish parliamentary enquiries (Marín Arrese 2015) and Catalan and Spanish parliamentary debates (De Cock & Nogué Serrano 2017), the use of cognate forms and seemingly similar patterns may in fact differ significantly across languages, mainly in terms of frequency, distribution and pragmatic/argumentative functioning. Finally, as noted by Goethals & Blancke (2014) in relation to thanking in French, Spanish and Dutch in the European Parliament, speakers of different languages adhere to different discursive conventions, even within the same parliament. In our paper, we will examine if and to what extent multi-word stance expressions can be used to uncover the variation of discursive conventions concerning stance-taking across linguistic communities. In our conclusion, we will sketch our future work, which mainly consists in extending the analysis to other languages (Dutch and English) and additional registers (newspaper editorials and research articles; cf. Neumann 2013, 2014) and in using parallel corpus data to analyze the impact of translation on some of the stance-related discursive and pragmatic traits of parliamentary proceedings.

This presentation reports on an exploratory, corpus-driven study of French and Spanish stance expressions in debates held at the European Parliament. Stance is here understood as "the speaker's evaluative, epistemic or affective positioning towards a stance object" (Kärkkäinen 2012: 2195). More specifically, our paper focuses on recurrent multi-word stance expressions, such as French à mon avis 'in my opinion', il me semble + ADJ + de 'it seems + ADJ + to', il est essentiel de 'it is essential to' and Spanish yo creo que 'I believe that', me gustaría 'I would like to', es necesario 'it is necessary', and takes stocks of insights from both contrastive pragmatics (Aijmer 2011) and contrastive phraseology (Ebeling & Oksefjell Ebeling 2013, Granger 2014). Our study relies on comparable Europarl subcorpora of European parliamentary proceedings in French and Spanish (see Koehn 2005), corresponding to approximately 10 years of debates (up to 2010) and 3 million tokens per language. The subcorpora used in this study are restricted to verbatim reports of speeches originally delivered in French and Spanish by Members of Parliament (see Cartoni & Meyer's directional version of Europarl, which relies on Europarl's language tag). In other words, they do not contain any translated texts. Even though it must be acknowledged that French and Spanish are occasionally used by non-native speakers in the European Parliament, in the vast majority of cases, the two languages are used by Members of Parliament from France, French-speaking Belgium and Spain, respectively. In this paper, we adopt a corpus-driven approach to stance. The stance data were obtained by automatically extracting n-grams (also called 'lexical bundles'), which are recurrent sequences of n contiguous words, i.e. "sequences of word forms that commonly go together in natural discourse" (Biber et al. 1999: 90). As pointed out by Granger (2014: 69), n-grams "are a powerful window onto pragmatics and rhetoric. It is undeniably a quick-and-dirty method, but one that has great heuristic power: it generates a multitude of word sequences that have so far received very little interest in the contrastive literature". In this study, we have extracted 2- to 5-grams with a minimum frequency of 50 occurrences per million words. The automatically retrieved n-grams were then manually analyzed in context so as to identify stance expressions and patterns. Methodologically, the comparative analysis of French and Spanish, which are arguably quite close, being two Romance languages, raises a number of issues. One of them is that Spanish is a pro-drop language, while French is not. As a result, Spanish stance expressions containing a conjugated verb form may either be 1- or 2-grams, depending on the optional overt expression of the subject (e.g. (yo) creo 'I believe', (nosotros) pensamos 'we think'), while in French, corresponding expressions typically contain two words (je crois 'I believe', nous pensons 'we think'). In order to ensure an optimal cross-linguistic comparability of the datasets analyzed, a number of additional single-word stance expressions corresponding to the multi-word sequences identified through the n-gram approach were also extracted (e.g. lamento/je regrette 'I regret', desearía/je souhaiterais 'I would like to'). The presentation of the results will proceed in three steps. First, we will provide a structured, contrastive overview of the hundreds of stance expressions uncovered through the n-gram approach adopted in this paper, paying special attention to well-known French-Spanish morphosyntactic contrasts, such as the compulsory subject expression in French vs. the pro-drop character of Spanish, and the wider use of verbs with an experiencer dative in Spanish (e.g. me gustaría decir 'I would like to say'; cf. Vázquez Rozas 2016). Second, we will zoom in on the different uses of formally similar or cognate forms, such as croire/creer 'believe' and penser/pensar 'think'. Indeed, as repeatedly shown in studies on French and English political interviews (Fetzer & Johansson 2010), English and Spanish parliamentary enquiries (Marín Arrese 2015) and Catalan and Spanish parliamentary debates (De Cock & Nogué Serrano 2017), the use of cognate forms and seemingly similar patterns may in fact differ significantly across languages, mainly in terms of frequency, distribution and pragmatic/argumentative functioning. Finally, as noted by Goethals & Blancke (2014) in relation to thanking in French, Spanish and Dutch in the European Parliament, speakers of different languages adhere to different discursive conventions, even within the same parliament. In our paper, we will examine if and to what extent multi-word stance expressions can be used to uncover the variation of discursive conventions concerning stance-taking across linguistic communities. In our conclusion, we will sketch our future work, which mainly consists in extending the analysis to other languages (Dutch and English) and additional registers (newspaper editorials and research articles; cf. Neumann 2013, 2014) and in using parallel corpus data to analyze the impact of translation on some of the stance-related discursive and pragmatic traits of parliamentary proceedings.