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Translation-specific lexicogrammar? 131
From the above it follows that although maintaining control of the status
of the corpus material is important in a corpus-based investigation, it is of even
more fundamental importance in a corpus-driven investigation. The potential
of the corpus to yield results that are relevant to the research question is
even more crucial in a corpus-driven study than in a corpus-based study for
the reason that the researcher must take all of the results into account in
description and analysis, and for the reason that theoretical statements are
made on the basis of corpus evidence alone. For these reasons, it is of vital
importance that the corpus is representative of the type of material of which it
is proposed to be representative. In the case of an investigation of translated vs.
original fiction texts, for instance, it is important that texts are representative
of non-translated and translated text, respectively, and that “comparable”
texts are as comparable as possible in terms of genre etc, although complete
comparability can never be achieved, and although there is a multitude of
problems associated with establishing comparability in translation corpora (cf.
Laviosa 1997).
The corpus used for this study is the fiction part of the English-Swedish
Parallel Corpus (ESPC), a combined comparable and aligned parallel corpus
of English and Swedish original and translated fiction and non-fiction texts.
The fiction corpus subcomponents used are each composed of 10–15,000
word extracts taken from 25 novels. The two comparable Swedish original
and translated subcorpora contain 308,160 and 346,649 words, respectively.
There are three text type categories in the fiction part of the corpus – general
fiction, crime and mystery and children’s fiction – and the English and Swedish
texts are matched in terms of genre, although the match is not complete
in some respects. The greatest difference between subcorpora is found in
the children’s fiction category, where there are five English originals and
one Swedish original. In the other fiction categories, category differences are
smaller (see Altenberg, Aijmer, & Svensson 2001).
An important issue pertaining to the textual status of the corpus is the
fact that it is composed of extracts taken from the beginnings of novels, rather
than of entire texts. It has been pointed out in other contexts that some
textual features tend to be unevenly distributed in book-length texts (Sinclair
1991:19). This limits the range of studies that can be made using the ESPC,
e.g. stylistic studies and studies of low frequency items. For other types of
study, such as the present one, it can be assumed that there is an acceptable
basic level of representativity, since this study is an investigation of highfrequency
grammatical items that are likely to be fairly evenly distributed in
longer texts. Further, the main focus in the investigation is on general features