From questionnaires to parallel corpora in typology

This rather programmatic paper discusses the use of parallel corpora in the typological study of grammatical categories. In the author's earlier work, tense-aspect categories were studied by means of a translational questionnaire, and cross-linguistic gramtypes were identified through their distribution in the questionnaire. It is proposed that a similar methodology could be applied to multilingual parallel corpora. The possibility of identifying grammatical markers by word-alignment methods is demonstrated with examples from Bible texts.