Corpus-based Contrastive Studies of Phraseology

Contrastive phraseology is a newlyemerging research field, which demands a thorough scrutiny of its methodology and an urgent exploration of necessary practical techniques.The present article discusses general methods for contrastive phraseology and attempts to establish three sets of practical techniques for such studies.First, we propose to start with recurrent translation equivalents, as shown in parallel corpora before proceeding to observe their mutualtranslatability and calculate their mutual correspondence to arrive at crosslanguage corresponding lexical units.Second, we propose to use recurrent translation equivalents of collocations as units of study before going on to examine typical collocations in a comprehensive monolingual corpus to establish equivalent phrases across two languages.Third, we explore a method by which similarities and differences of formal, semantic and functional features of recurrent translation equivalents are examined in comparable corpora to assess degrees of equivalence between phrasal units.The paper also addresses the value of translation equivalents, semantic relationships among lexical items as well as strategies in crosslanguage communication.