Editors’ introduction Functional and corpus perspectives in contrastive discourse analysis

This special issue of Linguistics and the Human Sciences offers a collection of original contributions to the study of languages in contrast from discourse, corpus, and functional perspectives. The papers were presented at the Sixth International Conference on Contrastive Linguistics, held in Berlin 29 September–3 October 2010, in the context of two panels: ‘Discourse analysis and contrastive linguistics’ (organized by Maite Taboada, Simon Fraser University and María de los Angeles Gómez-González, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), and ‘Contrastive linguistics, corpus analysis and annotation’ (organized by Julia Lavid, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and Erich Steiner, Universität des Saarlandes). Much of the ‘new wave’ of contrastive linguistics has focused on aspects of the grammatical system, examining phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic similarities and differences across two or more languages. As with many other areas of linguistics, there exists a renewed interest in discourse perspectives in the study of languages in contrast, and much of that work uses corpora and corpus linguistics techniques to study language. By ‘new wave’ of contrastive linguistics, we mean a renewed interest in the contrast and comparison of languages. The framework of the International Conferences in Contrastive Linguistics, initiated at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in the late 1990s, has provided a venue for the dissemination of such work. A number of volumes out of those conferences