In the last twenty years, contrastive linguistic research has benefited greatly from the introduction of parallel corpora; the valuable “bilingual output” supplied by translations “provides a basis of comparison, or at least justifies the assumption of comparability” (Gast, forthcoming, p. 8). This paper subjects the methodology of using parallel corpora for contrastive linguistic research to a critical analysis.
The paper presents the results of a systematic analysis of English sentences with subjectoperator inversion after sentence-initial only through their Czech equivalents in a parallel translation corpus of English and Czech (InterCorp). Though the number of relevant tokens found in a parallel translation corpus is inevitably low and the Czech equivalents can hardly account for all tokens of the absence of S-O inversion after sentence-initial only focusing fronted adverbials, they nonetheless bring interesting evidence about the function of only in these sentences and about the scope of only as a restrictive focusing modifier. The contrastive analysis also sheds new light on two Czech temporal particles teprve [not until] and ještě [still] and opens areas for future research on monolingual corpora of both English and Czech.
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