The Integration of Frequency Dimensions and Lexicalisation Preferences in Contrastive Analysis

A central topic in contrastive studies of language pairs or language classes is about establishing comparability, which means focusing on similarities and differences between languages. Similarity between language pairs presupposes that equivalent structures exist between the languages under study. But what does equivalence mean? Several studies have dealt with different types of equivalence, among others semantic or pragmatic equivalence, contextual equivalence or sentential equivalence. However, with particular attention to authentic discourse, equivalence has also to be defined in statistical terms, i.e. by focusing on the frequency of structures in the language pairs. This chapter aims at revisiting the notion of equivalence with an integration of the frequency dimension in contrastive studies. It will show that frequency differences in the use of similar structures in language pairs are very much dependent on the lexicalisation preferences in these languages. With two case studies for the language pair German versus French, we will demonstrate that the lexicalisation preferences depend, on the one hand, on the categorisation of both languages either as satellite-framed (German) or verb-framed (French) languages, and on the difference between synthetic (German) versus analytic (French) languages, on the other hand. The pair of languages under study, German and French, is particularly interesting as both languages have the same socio-cultural background, even if they are not genealogically related, but they belong to different typological classes and favour different lexicalisation patterns. The two studies provide evidence for the necessity to integrate frequency dimensions and favourite lexicalisation patterns in authentic contrastive analysis.