Expressing place in children’s literature - Testing the the n-gram method in contrastive linguistics

What is it about?

Place, as one of the most basic semantic categories, plays an important role in children’s literature. This contrastive corpus-based study aims to examine and compare how place, in its widest sense, is expressed in children’s literature in English and Czech. The study is data driven and the main methodological approach taken is through n-gram extraction.

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Why is it important?

This study tests the n-gram method, which in previous applications in contrastive analysis has raised a number of methodological issues: while giving reassuring results when applied to typologically closer languages, it proves to be challenging in the study of typologically different languages, such as English and Czech.