Reviewed by Beril T. Arik, Purdue University

This book successfully explores the interaction between learning and writing from the perspective of three main areas of inquiry in second-language writing (SLW): learning-to-write (LW), writing-to-learn content (WLC), and writing-to-learn language (WLL). The book consists of a preface by Alister Cumming, an introductory chapter by Rosa M. Manchón, nine chapters, and a concluding chapter by Lourdes Ortega. Manchón’s introductory chapter situates the book, which attempts to further our understanding of LW, WLC, and WLL, and their interaction, in second-language acquisition (SLA) and SLW literature.

Part 1 consists of three chapters presenting the theoretical foundations of and the research base in the LW, WLC, and WLL perspectives, respectively. In Ch. 2, Ken Hyland reviews the main strands of research on LW in university settings, their theoretical underpinnings, and pedagogical applications, by categorizing them according to their main foci: writers, texts, and readers. Similarly, in Ch. 3, Alan Hirvela surveys the empirical research and the pedagogical perspectives derived from these studies in WLC and calls for more research in this promising area. In Ch. 4, Rosa M. Manchón gives an overview of SLA research that investigates what writing can afford for language learning.

Part 2 focuses on empirical studies exploring how learning and writing interact in specific contexts. Ilona Leki’s chapter, ‘Learning to write in a second language: Multilingual graduates and undergraduates expanding genre repertoires’, investigates the interaction between LW and WLL from a multilingual perspective. Similarly, Suresh Canagarajah’s case study, ‘Writing to learn and learning to write by shuttling between languages’, emphasizes agency and a multilingual approach and claims that learning-to-write and writing-to-learn are inextricably intertwined. In ‘Beyond writing as language learning or content learning: Construing foreign language writing as meaning-making’, Heidi Byrnes explores how language and content learning can inform each other in a foreign language context. In Ch. 8, Fiona Hyland investigates the interactions between form-focused feedback and agency by focusing on student and teacher perceptions in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context. A chapter by Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios focuses on WLL and examines the development of the writers and their perceptions in an EFL university context in Spain. John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz illustrate how LW and WLL can come into contact in a detrimental way for learning in ‘Exploring the learning potential of writing development in heritage language education’.

Finally, Ortega summarizes the main themes of the book and draws attention to the interconnectedness between the three perspectives explored: LW, WLL and WLC. Overall, the chapters highlight the importance of investigating the interactions between various contexts and agency for multilingual writers, as well as illustrate how writing-to-learn and learning-to-write can facilitate or hinder each other. This book makes a great contribution to both the SLW and SLA fields by giving an overview of relevant research at the intersection of writing and language learning, encouraging a fruitful conversation between SLA and SLW research, and opening new avenues for future research to explore the interactions among LW, WLC, and WLL.

Reviewed by Colette van Kerckvoorde, Bard College at Simon’s Rock

It is generally accepted that children’s books have a significant impact on the development of a child’s literacy, and many studies have confirmed this, especially for children between the ages of four and six years. Nevertheless, literature and studies that deal exclusively with children up to three years old are virtually non-existent. This work aims to address this by specifically discussing research on early literacy and children’s books for readers under the age of three.

The first chapter, by the editor, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, serves as a general introduction. She cites reasons why the scholarly study of emergent literacy has been neglected and convincingly argues that it is possible to investigate how language acquisition, cognitive development, and emergent literacy can be stimulated at a very young age by children’s books. Such research has been made possible by new techniques for studying what infants and toddlers know and also by advances in language acquisition research since the mid-1980s. Kümmerling-Meibauer suggests that a multimodal approach is best suited for research in emergent literacy. When confronted with a book, children develop visual literacy and learn the rules of ‘book behavior’, they enlarge their lexicon and their syntactic and pragmatic knowledge, and they develop a sense of metalinguistic awareness through rhymes and short, rhythmic verses. Finally, she turns to the various kinds of books available to the youngest readers and indicates a lack of consensus for classifying these books. However, she describes the general characteristics of these books and emphasizes that they, in spite of the frequent lack of written text, prepare children to understand progressive narratives at about three years of age.

This work contains revised versions of fourteen papers presented at a 2009 conference at the Picturebook Museum, Burg Wissen, in Troisdorf, Germany. All contributions are written by scholars and professionals from various backgrounds, demonstrating that a multidisciplinary approach is especially suited for the study of emergent literacy. The fourteen articles are organized into three parts: the first part deals with the premises of early literacy. Especially interesting is Annette Werner’s contribution entitled ‘Color perception in infants and young children’ in which the author describes the development of color vision in young children and the implications for the choice of colors in picture books. The second part examines several categories of children’s books that are available for this age group and highlights how and why each category contributes to the development of literacy. In the third part, we find several case studies. One of these papers, Virginia Lowe’s ‘Don’t tell me about it—just read it to me!’ is an account of the author’s approach to introducing her own children to books. Another interesting contribution deals with two girls’ bilingual language development and their relationship to books.

This work is a lively and interesting introduction to the topic of books for young children and their role in the development of literacy. This book is well written, and its contributions are accessible to novices in the field. I recommend this book to authors and publishers of children’s books and to those interested in developmental psychology.

Reviewed by Natalie Operstein, California State University Fullerton

As stated in the editors’ note, this handbook aims ‘to present the state of the art of research in all aspects of the Spanish language’ (xxi). It consists of forty chapters, partially grouped in thematically-related clusters.

Spanish sound structure is covered in ‘The phonemes of Spanish’ (Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza), ‘Main phonological processes’ (Fernando Martínez-Gil), ‘Syllable structure’ (Sonia Colina), ‘Stress and rhythm’ (José Ignacio Hualde), and ‘Intonation in Spanish’ (Erin O’Rourke). Spanish word structure is discussed in ‘Derivation and compounding’ (Soledad Varela) and ‘Morphological structure of verbal forms’ (Manuel Pérez Saldanya).

Syntactic topics are addressed in ‘Structure of the noun phrase’ (M. Carme Picallo), ‘The simple sentence’ (Héctor Campos), ‘Coordination and subordination’ (Ricardo Etxepare), ‘Wh-movement: Interrogatives, exclamatives, and relatives’ (Jerid Francom), ‘Binding: Deixis, anaphors, pronominals’ (Luis Eguren), ‘Empty categories and ellipsis’ (Josep María Brucart and Jonathan E. Macdonald), and ‘Word order and information structure’ (Antxon Olarrea).

Semantics and pragmatics are emphasized in  ‘Quantification’ (Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach) and ‘Speech acts’ (Victoria Escandell-Vidal), while the following chapters cover interfaces among the various linguistic modules: ‘Morphophonological alternations’ (David Eddington), ‘Structure of the verb phrase’ (Jaume Mateu), ‘Indefiniteness and specificity’ (Manuel Leonetti), ‘Tense and aspect’ (Karen Zagona), ‘Mood: Indicative vs. subjunctive’ (Ignacio Bosque), and ‘Discourse syntax’ (Catherine E. Travis and Rena Torres Cacoullos).

Another group of chapters discusses topics related to language acquisition: ‘First language acquisition of Spanish sounds and prosody’ (Conxita Lleó), ‘The L2 acquisition of Spanish phonetics and phonology’ (Miquel Simonet), ‘Theoretical perspectives on the L2 acquisition of Spanish’ (Silvina Montrul), ‘Acquisition of Spanish in bilingual contexts’ (Carmen Silva-Corvalán), ‘Spanish as a heritage language’ (María M. Carreira), ‘Spanish as a second language and teaching methodologies’ (Cristina Sanz), ‘Reading words and sentences in Spanish’ (Manuel Carreiras, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, and Nicola Molinaro), ‘Lexical access in Spanish as a first and second language’ (Albert Costa, Iva Ivanova, Cristina Baus, and Nuria Sebastián-Gallés), and ‘Language impairments’ (José Manuel Igoa).

Several chapters are devoted to topics of particular theoretical interest to Spanish linguistics: ‘Ser and Estar: The individual/stage-level distinction and aspectual predication’ (José Camacho), ‘Clitics in Spanish’ (Francisco Ordóñez), ‘Passives and se constructions’ (Amaya Mendikoetxea), and ‘Forms of address’ (Bob de Jonge and Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen). Diachronic linguistics is the primary focus of ‘Spanish among the Ibero-Romance languages’ (Christopher J. Pountain) and ‘Historical morphosyntax and grammaticalization’ (Concepción Company Company). ‘Spanish in contact with Amerindian languages’ (Anna María Escobar) and ‘The Spanish-based creoles’ (J. Clancy Clements) focus on language-contact phenomena, and ‘Geographical and social varieties of Spanish: An overview’ (John M. Lipski), on dialectal variation.

Most chapters in this book combine descriptive outlines with theoretical analyses, although the presentation varies with the author, some preferring the bottom-up approach, from Spanish-language data to general linguistic theory, and others opting to exemplify theoretical models with Spanish-language data. The treatment in each chapter is selective, focusing on issues that are either central to, or particularly relevant for current theoretical concerns in, the relevant field. The book is geared toward the currently most researched topics in Spanish linguistics, and it will be of interest to students and researchers seeking critical state-of-the-art overviews of some of the most important current issues in the field.

Reviewed by Keith E. Johnson, California State University

This collection of twenty-four short chapters on Spanish linguistics is a well thought out contribution to the study of introductory Hispanic linguistics. Indeed, the title of the book could easily have been La lingüística a través del español, as the text serves two complementary functions: it addresses concerns and questions language learners often have and simultaneously introduces learners to numerous areas of linguistic analysis.

Each chapter deals with a subfield of applied linguistics in a way that speaks to language learners’ own experiences learning Spanish. This connection is deftly made in the titles of each chapter, which take the form of a question that a student with little or no prior training in linguistics might ask, often reflecting commonly held beliefs and linguistic myths. For example the first chapter, by Anne Edstrom and María José García Vizcaíno (1–13), which defines the field of linguistics, is entitled ‘They tell me I have to take a Linguistics class. That’s about grammar and conversation, isn’t it?’ (Chapter titles are in Spanish; all translations are mine.) Another example is Ana Oskoz’s chapter on pedagogy and learner errors entitled ‘I believe my Spanish professor should correct all the mistakes I make when I speak. It’s her responsibility, isn’t it?’ (242–51). It is through these introductory questions that chapter authors demonstrate that the commonest learner queries can have broad linguistic implications.

Other linguistic subfields treated in the book include phonetics, in Shaw Gynan’s chapter entitled ‘Spanish speakers speak like they’re in a hurry: Why does Spanish sound faster than English?’ (14–25). Dialectology is touched upon in Edwin M. Lamboy’s ‘I have a hard time understanding my Caribbean friends’ Spanish. Why is that?’ (153–65). Pragmatics and politeness are introduced in ‘Spanish speakers interrupt me a lot. Don’t they know that shows a lack of respect?’ by Carmen García (108–20). There are also chapters introducing historical linguistics, language processing, first-langauge acquisition and the critical period hypothesis, language contact, and the difference between native and heritage speakers of Spanish. Each chapter concludes by revisiting its titular question and summarizing the chapter’s efforts to answer it, replete with a bibliography and activities designed to allow students to reflect on the material covered and to put it into practice by analyzing data.

The true innovation of this book is that it can help instructors of Hispanic linguistics bridge two often large gaps in their classes: the gap between abstract academic material and real world experience, and the gap between presentation of linguistic concepts to uninitiated students and the desire to have students read primary literature, which they often find daunting. Individual chapters may be used to complement the course text and lectures, and to prepare students for reading primary sources from the bibliography at the end of each chapter, which in turn can assist students in seeking readings for course projects. No chapter is prerequisite reading for another, so instructors can freely choose the chapters that they wish to use without worrying that the topic of a given chapter might require a great deal of prior introduction.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, University of Nizwa

This updated edition of a popular reference book is an eminently useful guide for bachelor’s and master’s students of language and linguistics throughout their studies. While the description of subject areas and the project ideas are geared towards the study of English linguistics in a native-speaker context, the text could feasibly be used for other languages, particularly the later sections dealing with the practical considerations of undertaking research. The book comprises four sections: areas of study in linguistics, techniques for collecting data, tools for data analysis, and presenting research.

The book begins with an introduction to conducting research for a university course consisting of brief paragraph-long overviews of practical issues involved in conceptualizing and undertaking a data-based research project of dissertation length. Part 1 provides an overview of ten fields of research in linguistics, from psycholinguistics to computer-mediated communication. Each chapter in this section begins with a list of the type of questions or concerns that the literature typically engages with, thus serving to orient the student in the subject area. This is followed by a list of reputable journals that publish research related to the respective field and, in some cases, an overview of introductory terms. The main body of each chapter contains a description of the central themes that comprise each field of research, interspersed with lists of project ideas. While many of these could doubtlessly be lifted from the book and undertaken, others serve to stimulate further thinking.

Part 2 is dedicated to the logistics of undertaking research and explains the various methods that may be employed to compile data. This is followed by a section on how data may be analyzed, focusing on transcribing speech, using corpora, and doing basic statistical analyses. Part 4, the final section, looks at the mechanics of presenting one’s research either in written form or orally. The most general in focus, this section is not specific to language majors, but could be used by students of any discipline.

One of this book’s central objectives is to help students arrive at viable topics for small-scale research, and this is certainly achieved. A second goal is to provide the stimulus and support to language majors to undertake empirical studies involving a basic level of statistical analysis. This is achieved in a gentle, unintimidating manner to coax those wary of numerical or statistical data into action.

Seldom are reference works viewed as complete; this book omits translation and interpreting from the subject areas. Inclusion of these topics would have been welcome, as they are often components of undergraduate degree programs in contexts where English is taught as a second language. Further, considering the utility of this book outside the context of the United Kingdom, a greater number of project ideas for world English dialects would be welcome.

While this book serves the immediate needs and interests of bachelor’s or master’s students, its highly practical orientation and user-friendly organization makes it also a useful source of materials and ideas for instructors of introductory research courses.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, University of Nizwa

This monograph is directed at graduate students in the humanities who are considering undertaking empirical research or those who, while possessing some experience, wish to develop their use of empirical research methods. While some coverage of qualitative research is provided, the main focus is on quantitative studies. Throughout the book, the authors argue for a more rigorous approach to research on cultural phenomena in the humanities through the collection and examination of empirical data.

The book comprises twelve chapters. The first chapter provides a general introduction to the place of empirical research in the humanities, demonstrating how data collection can be relevant to our reception and understanding of literary texts. This chapter closes with an afterword in which the authors present and critically discuss common beliefs held in the humanities regarding the intrinsic difference between research in the sciences and humanities. This section serves to interact with the reader by questioning assumptions and entrenched positions on the nature of research in the humanities.

Ch. 2 offers an overview of basic scientific concepts, followed by an introduction to the conceptualization of a research project and compilation of background literature. Ch. 4 looks at data collection from a qualitative research perspective, while the subsequent two chapters focus on designing and implementing questionnaires and experiments for the purpose of quantitative data collection. Chs. 7–11 focus on the analysis of data using SPSS software, beginning with entering data and proceeding to analyzing data using descriptive and inferential statistics.

To assist the reader with the abstract nature of quantitative research methods, most chapters close with a reference to exercises available on the publisher’s website. The final chapter provides the reader with instruction for preparing a paper for a conference presentation and journal submission. The text ends with an epilogue in which the authors counter lingering scepticism regarding the suitability of empirical research in the humanities; the reader may wonder whether a glossary of key terms employed throughout the text might be more useful at this point.

This is an outstanding book and one that will likely prompt many scholars from the humanities to consider how an empirical approach to research may contribute new insights to their particular fields. It takes the reader from a basic introductory level to a level of understanding the fundamentals of using scientific software for data analysis. Although there are many texts on the market offering an introduction to research, few are directed specifically towards students from the humanities or are written in an easily comprehensible, though still scholarly, style.

This book is very accessible to an international readership on account of the absence of unnecessarily idiomatic language and cultural references that assume in-depth understanding of sociocultural phenomena common in Western Anglophone countries. This book is highly recommended as a reference text or course text for both graduate students and teachers of research methodology.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, University of Nizwa

This recent publication on second-language writing in academic contexts brings together three strands of research: acquiring academic writing skills, characteristics of second-language writing, and themes relating to writer identity.

In the first section, themes related to the status of English as an international language of academia and research are explored. The first contribution describes the implementation of a program to train mid-career Chinese scientists to write up research in English at a standard appropriate for publication. By making writing and publication practices explicit, the program appears to bolster the participants’ confidence in their ability to publish internationally. The second contribution describes the use of electronic corpus analysis in training second-language writers to perceive semantic and discursive characteristics of reporting verbs as they appear in different sections of an article. The topic of reporting verbs is taken up later in the text in an examination of how reader presence or stance may be expressed through the choice of a reporting verb.

Chinese student feedback preferences comprise the subject of the following study. Despite previous positive experience with peer feedback, the undergraduate students included in the study express preferences for teacher feedback, the reasons for which may be partly cultural. The final contribution in this section examines the social context in which doctoral students undertake the writing of their dissertation; rather predictably, time management and motivational issues are highlighted, but also supervisory concerns owing to the potentially conflicting expectations held by many (particularly international) students regarding the role of their supervisor.

The second section opens with an analysis of conclusions to PhD theses, which identifies the heterogeneity of how a concluding section is structured and formulated across various disciplines. A study that follows addresses shell nouns, pointing to the narrower range of functions of this type of noun in writing produced by highly proficient undergraduate second-language writers when compared to their peers writing in their first language. This section closes with a study of the use of graphs and other visuals in the work of non-native speaking students at British universities, which, as the author demonstrates, constitute an important channel to convey key information among this group of students in particular.

The final section, ‘identity work’, opens with a descriptive, reflective study of graduate-level students with highly proficient language skills in multiple languages, and how such bi- or multilingual speakers label themselves and respond to labels imposed upon them. The final chapter (from the editor) explores the many benefits that scholars bring to international research communities through insider knowledge of different cultural practices and academic traditions.

This is a professionally produced compendium of different voices and topics, which provides graduate students and scholars with an overview of current themes in second-language writing research.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The EFL University

This second volume of a two-volume set is divided into four parts and consists of Parts 3–6. Part 3 provides a detailed inventory of the structural possibilities with closed-class items. Parts 4 and 5 take up syntactic factors like scope, modification, and ellipsis, which contribute to ambiguity, and Part 6 concludes the discussion with formulas that can be exploited for such uses as jokes, advertisements, business logos, greeting cards, bumper stickers, and headline captions.

Ch. 10 deals with the role of pronouns in creating structural ambiguity. Ambiguity results when pronouns refer to different referents, are interpreted in idiomatic expressions, assume the same forms in different grammatical roles, and involve varying degrees of inclusivity in plural forms. Ch. 11 explores the role of prepositions in creating ambiguity. Prepositions can have multiple meanings, which may be metaphorically and idiomatically extended, may be homophonous with other grammatical elements, or may be confused with particles in phrasal verbs. Ch. 12 explores coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. Conjunctions cause ambiguity by way of their multiple interpretations, their conjunctive vs. disjunctive uses, the omission of information in coordinated structures, and their variable scope and modification potential.

Ch. 13, the first in Part 4, deals with nominal modifiers, which include other nouns, adjectives, determiners, post- and pre-determiners, and restrictors. Their optionality, ability to hide distinctions between different subtypes of nouns, and membership in and ability to modify members of multiple word-classes can all lead to ambiguity. Ch. 14 deals with post-modification ambiguity in nouns and verbs found in prepositional phrases and clauses, apart from ‘dangling’, ‘squinting’, and ‘sentential’ modifiers. Negation leads to focus and scope ambiguity.

Ch. 15, the first in Part 5, discusses structural ambiguity due to ellipsis, even when one is only assumed. Elliptical structures involving auxiliaries, gapping, imperative verbs, infinitive clauses, and verbless clauses are discussed. Ch. 16 explores ambiguity involving questions and reported speech. Questions can be elliptical, and involve movement, while reported speech inverts questions into statements and changes tense and deictic references. Ch. 17, the last in Part 5, discusses the potential of idioms, exclamations, and multiword verbs (phrasal verbs) in creating ambiguity, largely due to the possibility of their being literally interpreted apart from their fixed meanings.

Ch. 18, constituting Part 6, forms the conclusion of the two volumes. It provides illustrative formulas to help consciously construct structural ambiguity in order to facilitate word-play. The book ends with useful appendices, including a list of consonant and vowel substitutions, formulas for words with competing word classes, formulas for multiword verbs, formulas for participles, formulas for compound nouns, and concord problems.

This book provides useful insights into the conscious manipulation of language for multiple purposes. Though reducing human creativity to a list of formulas might appear too simplistic, this book can be used as a starting point. Linguists will find the examples and discussions useful, though they may not approve of the author’s propensity to use the same examples as instances of structural ambiguity of different word-classes.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The EFL University

This book, the first volume in a two-volume set, is divided into two parts. It contains Part 1, which sets the background by concentrating on theoretical and structural factors, and Part 2, which provides a detailed inventory of the structural possibilities of open-class items.

Ch. 1 discusses the deliberate creation of structural word-play by way of an inventory of formulas that exploit homonyms, gaps, and vulnerability in the grammatical system. What is and is not an instance of structural ambiguity is also laid out here. Ch. 2 focuses on the role of contextual information in clarifying and creating structural ambiguity. Contextual information includes world knowledge and assumptions about the intention of a speaker, ambiguity in telegraphic speech and other registers, age of a text, and expected/assumed competence of speakers, among other features.

Ch. 3 deals with phonological factors that lead to multiple structural interpretations, exploiting phonological processes that erase or smudge distinctions by creating homophones or near-homophones by way of assimilation, epenthesis, or deletion. Uncertainty about word-boundaries in speech and indeterminacy of vowels in unstressed syllables can also be exploited. Ch. 4 focuses on structural ambiguity in various clause types, mostly due to the misanalysis of auxiliaries as main verbs and of main verbs as participial/adjectival complements, or by the masking of subject-verb concord in passives and with modals. Ch. 5, which concludes Part 1, explores morphological features resulting in ambiguity. This includes homophonous affixes like –s and affixes with multiple meanings, and also the potential for incorrect analysis of a linguistic element as an affix that is actually part of the root or base of a word.

Part 2 begins with Ch. 6, which explores the contribution of nouns to structural ambiguity. Nouns can lead to ambiguity by way of the homophonous plural marker –s, optional determiners with some nouns, and the homophony of proper nouns and titles with common nouns. The interpretation of compounds as modifier+noun can also contribute to ambiguity, and there is inherent ambiguity in interpreting compounds. Chs. 7 and 8 explore structural ambiguity in terms of the structural capabilities of transitive and linking/intransitive verbs, respectively, to build multiple sentence/clause types. These depend on the reinterpretation of objects/complements as the other, or in interpreting what follows the verb as a clause/phrase/phrase+complement. Ch. 9 explores structural ambiguities involving adjectives and adverbs by addressing homophony between the two, the ability of adverbs to modify words belonging to more than one word class, inherent and non-inherent meanings, and the transitive/intransitive use of adjectives.

The expected audience being diverse, this book deliberately avoids using much linguistic terminology and, where it does, it provides useful explanations. This book is a positive addition to work on humor and word-play in the linguistic literature. Many examples have been provided to support the arguments presented. Linguists will find the book useful in their classrooms, although at times they may find the repetition of the same examples under different grammatical categories to be superfluous or even unjustified.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University

This book explores the essential quantitative methods in corpus-based translation studies. It is divided into four sections and accompanied by a preface, a list of contributors, eight appendices, and a subject index.

Part 1 looks at theoretical explorations, focusing on the interplay between qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (3–34) applies cognitive linguistic methods and investigates explicit corpus-based data with a more tacit semantic enquiry. Stefan Th. Gries and Stefanie Wulff (35–52) report on how to compute simple binary logistic regressions and linear regressions with an open-source programming language. Analytical frameworks proposed by Meng Ji (53–72) integrate quantitative and qualitative analyses of textual and contextual events and facts of translation.

Part 2 contains more technical detail and case studies. Lidun Hareide and Knut Hofland (75–113) present the compilation process of the Norwegian Spanish Parallel Corpus at the University of Bergen along with some preliminary findings of this research. Michael P. Oakes (115–47) concentrates on descriptive statistics, verifying the use of terms and phenomena like ‘average’ occurrence, ‘bell curve’, vocabulary richness, and collocations. Various clustering techniques as well as methods for document processing, discussed in the article by Shih-Wen Ke (149–74), can reveal information about linguistic similarities from translational corpora.

Part 3 is devoted to the quantitative exploration of literary translation. Investigating the stylistic profiles of the early English translations of Cao Xueqin’s masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber, Meng Ji and Michael P. Oakes (177–208) incorporate a set of bivariate statistics, commonly used in the comparison of corpora. A comparative stylometric analysis of James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ in Turkish translation is the object of study in the article by Jon M. Patton and Fazli Can (209–29). In addition, Jan Rybicki (231–48) contributes to machine-learning stylometric distance methodology by applying Burrow’s delta method to translations and evaluating the empirical results.

Part 4 acquaints the reader with quantitative exploration of translation lexis. In his article, Meng Ji (251–73) presents how the development of a working scientific language impacted the establishment of China’s early modern scientific identity, which also is the result of its increasing engagement with Occidental concepts and idea sets. Alexandre Sotov (275–99) explores tools of corpus linguistics and game theory applied to an aligned parallel corpus of the ancient Indian religious poetry ‘Rigveda’ and its translations in German and Russian, where such techniques as transcription and explicitation are used. Multivariate techniques as factor analysis, principal component analysis, and correspondence analysis are exemplified in the Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray’s study (301–23) of the productivity and usage of derivational affixes in English-language translations. Gert De Sutter, Isabelle Delaere, and Koen Plevoets (325–45) report on the long-standing issue in translation studies regarding why translated texts differ from the non-translated texts in the same language. The findings show significant differences between the two categories of texts, and how linguistic behavior varies with text type and source language.

This book will contribute to the need for a systematic description of various statistical tests adapted for translation research purposes.