Piotr Bański, Nils Diewald, Marc Kupietz and Beata Trawiński

Applying the newly extended European Reference Corpus EuReCo

Pilot studies of light-verb constructions in German, Romanian, Hungarian and Polish

Keywords: comparable corpora; collocation analysis; light-verb constructions; EuReCo

It is well known that the distribution of lexical and grammatical patterns is size- and register-sensitive (Biber 1986, and later publications). This fact alone presents a challenge to many corpus-oriented linguistic studies focusing on a single language. When it comes to cross-linguistic studies using corpora, the challenge becomes even greater due to the lack of high-quality multilingual corpora (Kupietz et al. 2020; Kupietz/Trawiński 2022), which are comparable with respect to the size and the register. That was the motivation for the creation of the European Reference Corpus EuReCo, an initiative started in 2013 at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) together with several European partners (Kupietz et al., 2020). EuReCo is an emerging federated corpus, with large virtual comparable corpora across various languages and with an infrastructure supporting contrastive research. The core of the infrastructure is KorAP (Diewald et al. 2016), a scalable open-source platform supporting the analysis and visualisation of properties of texts annotated by multiple and potentially conflicting information layers, and supporting several corpus query languages.

Until recently, EuReCo consisted of three monolingual subparts: the German Reference Corpus DeReKo (Kupietz et al. 2018), the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (Barbu Mititelu/Tufiş/Irimia 2018), and the Hungarian National Corpus (Váradi 2002). The goal of the present submission is twofold. On the one hand, it reports about the new component of EuReCo: a sample of the National Corpus of Polish (Przepiórkowski et al. 2010). On the other hand, it presents the results of a new pilot study using the newly extended EuReCo. This pilot study investigates selected Polish collocations involving light verbs and their prepositional / nominal complements (Fig. 1) and extends the collocation analyses of German, Romanian and Hungarian (Fig. 2) discussed in Kupietz and Trawiński (2022).

Fig 1: Light verb constructions in Polish: concordances and PoS-annotation of da(wa)ć do zrozumienia (= to give sb. to understand)

Fig 2.: Light Verb Construction comparison Romanian-German (left) and analysis Hungarian (right) using DeReKo, CoRoLa, HNC and the KorAP-APIs

References

Barbu Mititelu, Verginica/Tufiş, Dan/Irimia, Elena (2018): The Reference Corpus of the Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa). In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). Miyazaki, Japan: European Language Resources Association (ELRA). https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L18-1189.

Biber, Douglas (1986): Spoken and Written Textual Dimensions in English: Resolving the Contradictory Findings. In: Language, 62(2), pp. 384–414. https://doi.org/10.2307/414678.

Diewald, Nils/Hanl, Michael/Margaretha, Eliza/Bingel, Joachim/Kupietz, Marc/Bański, Piotr/Witt, Andreas (2016): KorAP Architecture ― Diving in the Deep Sea of Corpus Data. In: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16). Portorož, Slovenia: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), pp. 3586–3591. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L16-1569.

Kupietz, Marc/Diewald, Nils/Trawiński, Beata/Cosma, Ruxandra/Cristea, Dan/Tufiş, Dan/Váradi, Tamás/Wöllstein, Angelika (2020): Recent developments in the European Reference Corpus EuReCo. In: Translating and Comparing Languages: Corpus-based Insights. Selected Proceedings of the Fifth Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies Conference. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, pp. 257–273.

Kupietz, Marc/Lüngen, Harald/Kamocki, Paweł/Witt, Andreas (2018): The German Reference Corpus DeReKo: New Developments – New Opportunities. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). Miyazaki, Japan: European Language Resources Association (ELRA). https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L18-1689.

Kupietz, Marc/Trawiński, Beata (2022): Neue Perspektiven für kontrastive Korpuslinguistik: Das Europäische Referenzkorpus EuReCo. In: Auteri, Laura/Barrale, Natascia/Di Bella, Arianna/Hoffmann, Sabine (eds.): Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive. Akten des XIV. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG) (Bd. 6). Bern: Peter Lang (Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik - Beihefte - 6), pp. 417–439.

Przepiórkowski, Adam/Górski, Rafał L./Łaziński, Marek/Pęzik, Piotr (2010): Recent Developments in the National Corpus of Polish. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10). Valletta, Malta: European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/152_Paper.pdf.

Váradi, Tamás (2002): The Hungarian National Corpus. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’02). Las Palmas, Canary Islands - Spain: European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2002/pdf/217.pdf.

Contact information

Piotr Bański
Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache
banski@ids-mannheim.de

Nils Diewald
Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache
diewald@ids-mannheim.de

Marc Kupietz
Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache
kupietz@ids-mannheim.de

Beata Trawiński
Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache
trawinski@ids-mannheim.de