Čermáková, A. & Chlumská, L. 2017. Expressing place in children’s literature. In T. Egan & H. Dirdal (eds), Cross-linguistic Correspondences. From Lexis to Genre, 75-96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Expressing place in children’s literature Testing the limits of the n-gram method in contrastive linguistics Anna Čermáková & Lucie Chlumská Place, as one of the most basic semantic categories, plays an important role in children’s literature. This contrastive corpus-based study aims to examine and compare how place, in its widest sense, is expressed in children’s literature in English and Czech. The study is data driven and the main methodological approach taken is through n-gram extraction. At the same time, it aims to further test the method, which in previous applications in contrastive analysis has raised a number of methodological issues: while giving reassuring results when applied to typologically closer languages, it proves to be challenging in the study of typologically different languages, such as English and Czech. The second objective of this study is therefore to further address these issues and explore the potential of this methodology. The analysis is based on both comparable and parallel corpora: comparable corpora of English and Czech children’s literature and a parallel corpus of English children’s literature and its translations into Czech. 1. Introduction Children’s books have an immensely important (direct or indirect) influence socially and culturally, and are “overtly important educationally, and commercially” (Hunt 2005: 1). One of the much discussed concerns regarding children’s literature relates to its educational importance – what Nikolajeva calls the “literary–didactic split” (Nikolajeva 2005: xi). This literary–didactic split arises from an inherent feature of children’s literature, its asymmetrical character between the target audience, i.e. children, and the writers (and more widely publishers, educators and parents), i.e. adults. The tension created by this asymmetry opens up an area for researchers who see children as a potentially less empowered group and the study of children’s literature is consequently often linked to questions of ideology and power. From the linguistic point of view, children’s literature plays an extremely important role in language acquisition. Which books should be read by schoolchildren is a major concern for all designers of national curricula. It is therefore surprising that the language of children’s literature has been researched only marginally. One of the key characteristics of children’s literature is its specific intertextuality that travels across national literary traditions and is distinctively international. In this sense, translation, as a form of adaptation and intertextuality, plays an extremely important role in this field. The importance of translation, however, varies in different national literary traditions. For small languages, such as Czech, translations constitute a substantial part of the canon of children’s literature. Corpus based translation studies have confirmed that there are differences be- tween non-translated and translated language (e.g. Mauranen 2000; Laviosa 2002; Xiao 2010) and suggested that some of these differences may be common to all translations regardless of their source language, as they arise from the translation process per se. These are called translation universals (e.g. Baker 1993; Mauranen & Kujamäki 2004). Recent research into differences between translated and non-translated Czech has confirmed some of these findings, which have so far been largely based on English only (Chlumská forthcoming, Chlumská & Richterová 2014). This research has been largely quantitative and based on monolingual com- parable corpora of translated and non-translated language. The results pointed to a further need to examine these differences in more detail, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and to