Computers in the Yugoslav Serbo-Croat/English Contrastive Analysis Project

0.i. As far as the present writer is aware, the Yu~o-s-~av Serbo-Croat/English Contrastive Analysis Project'is the first contrastlve analysis effort to use a large corpus of parallel texts. The corpus is made up of the Brown Corpus (reduced by 50%) with its Serbo-Croat translation, and a smaller Control Corpus (Serbo-Croat originals and English translation). A total, thus, of twice 500,000 words plus twice 150,000 words, or a grand total of some 1,300,000 words of running text. 0.2. The Project, let us make it clear, is not exclusively based on this corpus. Compilation and confrontation of grammatical statements by various authors, plus plain old intuition, figure prominently in the methodology. The insistence on a large corpus, however, is due to the conviction, prevailing among the Project workers, that only an extensive investigation of correspondences (original-language elements and their translations) can adequately reveal the less predictable patterns which ten~ to have a considerable contrastive analysis potential. 0.21. The most productive method of obtaining correspondences from our corpus is to concordance separately its Serbo-Croat and English parts, then to merge the resulting KWIC concordances into a contrastive KWIC concordance (with English keywords and alternating English and Serbo-Croat lines). For the more promising patterns, the merging procedure will be used twice, with both English and Serbo-Croat keywords. 0.22. In view of the size of the corpus, and the extensive concordancing required as a major procedure in the Project, the need for computer processing is obvious. It requires no undue strain on imagination to realize the soul-numbing effect of sheer physical handling of this mass of text if written out on slips. Even in its most efficient and flexible form of a manual concordance (a sentence-slip file with keywords underlined monolingually), without which no manual pairing