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WORKING WITH GERMAN CORPORA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2008

Senta Goertler
Senta Goertler
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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WORKING WITH GERMAN CORPORA. Bill Dodd (Ed.). Birmingham: The University of Birmingham University Press, 2000. Pp. xxvii + 299. $60.00 paper.

Corpus linguistics is a growing field within applied linguistics. Yet, most research has investigated the use of English. Furthermore, different research applications of corpora are usually discussed separately. Dodd's edited volume shows samples of corpus research from different Germanist perspectives. The volume is introduced with a thorough overview and a short description of available corpora. Dodd's first chapter is an introduction to the diverse applications and key terminology.

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BOOK NOTICES
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 123 - 124
Copyright
© 2008 Cambridge University Press

Corpus linguistics is a growing field within applied linguistics. Yet, most research has investigated the use of English. Furthermore, different research applications of corpora are usually discussed separately. Dodd's edited volume shows samples of corpus research from different Germanist perspectives. The volume is introduced with a thorough overview and a short description of available corpora. Dodd's first chapter is an introduction to the diverse applications and key terminology.

The volume exhibits a breadth of applications: Burgess and Lawson showcase a corpus-based literary analysis: Goethe's Wahlverwandschaften and Thomas Mann's Joseph und seine Brüder, respectively; Dodd, West, and Witton take an historical perspective: Ost-West before and during the unification, early new high German, and subjunctive verb forms of the 1960s and 1990s, respectively; Gupta and Jones use corpus linguistics to analyze language structures: be-verbs and accusative and dative prepositions; Mackison, Wichmann, and Nielsen investigate language-context-specific corpora (business German and legal contracts); Kenny discusses the applications of corpus linguistics in the field of translation; and Roe deals with a textbook corpus for language learning. The learner-driven pedagogical application of corpus linguistics in Roe's chapter might match foreign language pedagogical trends in Europe, but it is not a fit with current American trends.

This volume is an eye-opening exploration of the multiple uses of corpora in German studies. It is an avenue to explore communication and collaboration between the often divided language and literature faculty. It is also a good book to show graduate students in German studies different possible directions of their study using the same general methodology. Whereas the chapters are inspiring for research methodology and some SLA applications are hinted at, none deals with SLA issues specifically, nor does the book include learner language corpora. Hence, the volume offers only limited direct application to the field of SLA and teaching, especially in an American context. Nonetheless, it is an interesting volume from a research methodological standpoint and a resource for those who want a list of available corpora.