Variation and stability: The HAVE-PERFECT and the tense-aspect grammar of western European languages

In recent work, we showcased Translation Mining as a novel translation corpus-based approach to cross-linguistic research. This chapter works out how Translation Mining compares to other translation corpus-based approaches, and in particular how its analyses compare to those of Primary Data Typology and Corpus-Based Contrastive Linguistics. Study 1 shows how Translation Mining allows one to compare multiple constructions across multiple languages in parallel. Study 2 checks the foundational assumption of translation corpus-based approaches according to which the meanings of contexts across translations are constant. The two studies focus on the HAVE-PERFECT as their empirical domain, consolidate and extend the findings of our earlier work, and contribute to translation corpus-based research methodology.