Open Access

Marc Kupietz, Piotr Bański, Nils Diewald, Beata Trawiński, Andreas Witt

• This paper gives an overview of recent developments concerning the European Reference Corpus EuReCo, an open long-term initiative aimed at providing and using virtual and dynamically definable comparable corpora based on existing national, reference or other large corpora. Given the problems and shortcomings of other types of multilingual corpora – such as the shining-through effects in parallel corpora or the limitation to web material only in web-based comparable corpora – EuReCo constitutes a unique linguistic resource that offers new perspectives for fine-grained cross-linguistic research. The approach advocated here puts forward new solutions to notorious IPR and licensing issues, as well as to challenges of interoperability. It also addresses methodological questions concerning comparability and representativeness. While the focus of this paper is on EuReCo’s implementation-based approach to ensuring interoperability in a feasible and maintainable way, it also presents preliminary results of pilot comparative studies on light verb constructions in German, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish and Bulgarian, and reports on recent extensions and plans.