Constructions in Parallel Corpora: A Quantitative Approach

The primary goal of the present study is to find an adequate method for the quantitative analysis of empirical data obtained from parallel corpora. Such a task is particularly important in the case of fixed constructions possessing some degree of idiomaticity and language specificity. Our data consist of the Russian construction дело в том, что and its parallels in English, German and Swedish. This construction, which appears to present no difficulty for translation into other languages, is in fact, language-specific when compared with other languages. It displays a large number of different parallels (translation equivalents) in other languages, and possesses a complex semantic structure. The configuration of semantic elements comprising the content plane of this construction is unique. The empirical data have been collected from the corpus query system Sketch Engine, subcorpus OPUS2 Russian, and the Russian National Corpus (RNC). We propose to use the Herfindahl index as a tool for quantitative analysis in order to measure the degree of uniformity in the frequency distribution of the various translations of the construction under investigation. This tool is not universal and does not enable us to answer all the questions that arise in connection with determining the specificity of language units. However, it clearly helps to obtain more objective results and to refine the quantitative analysis of idiomatic constructions on the basis of corpus data.