¡Descarga Introduction to contrastive studies y más Apuntes en PDF de Cultura Inglesa solo en Docsity!
- Introduction to contrastive studies 16/02/
Contrastive Linguistics is also referred to as Comparative Descriptive Linguistics or Linguistic Confrontation, depending on the author. It started in the 19th century.
(2A) → Comparing language families and explaining the origin of them (2B) → After WWII, learning a foreign language became popular in the USA (2C) → Generative grammar: According to them, all human beings have an innate learning device that allows them to learn a language. There are some features in common, and some others in which they differ.
1.1. Comparative Philology or Comparative Grammar: Origins of English and Spanish
(3) → Crystal quotes Sir William Jones, from a speech made in 1786 to the Asiatic Society when he was Chief Justice in Bengal.
Rasmus Rask, in 1814 → An investigation into the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language. This method of analysis led to the discovery that European languages were historically related, not only to each other, but also to Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and so on. All these languages had a common source (Proto-Indoeuropean).
Proto-language : Reconstructed language that is said to be the ancestor of real languages (that have existed or exist at present)
Indoeuropean : It get its name from the distribution of the speakers, in the area of Europe and India.
Indoeuropean broke up into a number of dialects that gave rise to the languages such as Latin, Greek, Germanic; and later to the formation of the languages of the present.
Both zones () speak the same language (A). Thanks to a process of divergence , the languages may become so different from each other that they can be regarded finally as different languages.
The contrary can be found in the process of convergence. If this process is applied, a language family is reduced to a single language.
In 1822, Jacob Grimm established Grimm’s law. According to this rule, voiceless stop consonants in Indoeuropean became voiceless fricatives in Germanic.
/p/ → /f/ /t/ → /θ/ /k/ → /h/
Cognate words : Words with a similar origin. E.g.: pedem-foot, piscis-fish, tres-three, cordem- heart, cornu-horn.
Karl Verner, in 1877, pointed out that Grimm’s law worked only under two conditions:
- Consonants had to be in initial position
- Or immediately preceded by stress
If none of this two conditions were fulfilled, the following rules applied:
- Voiceless stop consonants became voiced fricatives in Germanic ( Verner’s law ):
/p/ → /β/ /t/ → /ð/ /k/ → /ɣ/
There were systematic resemblances from Italic and Germanic. They belong to the same family of languages. Two or more languages are genetically related if (6):
- They have corresponding phonemes
- They have meanings that are related
17/02/
1.2. Contrastive linguistics, error analysis and interlanguage
Oller, in a paper that he wrote in 1971, called “Difficulty and predictability” speaks of Contrastive Analysis (8): Contrastive Analysis is a device for predicting points of difficulty and some of the errors that the learners will make.
James, 1980: Contrastive Analysis. He established the basis for the use of a comparative method to account for the possible cause of errors.
Lado, 1957: Linguistics across Cultures (9): We can predict and describe patterns that will cause difficulty in learning.
Volumes of the Contrastive Structure series. These studies describe the differences and similarities, in a phonological, morphological and syntactic levels between English and other five languages: French, German, Russian, Italian and Spanish. In the preface to one of these books included in this series (the book by Stockwell et alii), Charles A. Ferguson states that (10): Contrast Analysis based on descriptivism.
Linguists differ in the way they handle the question of errors. Some of them affirm that error can be predicted by Contrastive Analysis, thanks to the Strong Version of the Contrastive Analysis hypothesis (11): The difficulties in learning an L2 are caused by the interference and differences between L1 and L2. L1 interference accounts for the problems people has while learning a new language (L2).
Arguments against the Strong Version of the Contrastive Analysis hypothesis (12): there were many errors that were not caused by the interference of the speaker’s mother tongue.
Stages in negation :
i. Negative element placed before the word *I not like it
ii. Don’t is introduced, but it is used for third person singular, as well as for past tense and modals ? (^) I don’t like it (I don’t/didn’t like it) *She don’t like it *She don’t can’t come
iii. Negative element after copulative verbs and modals, they still make mistakes with third person singular I am not hungry I cannot come *She don’t like it
iv. Correct grammatical structures She doesn’t agree You didn’t come
Regardless of their L1, all students go through the same stages when learning English as an L2. That goes against the Strong Version of the Contrastive Analysis hypothesis.
The error analysis hypothesis establishes that most errors of L2 language learning were not influenced by the student’s L1, but they were similar to the errors we make when we acquire our own language.
(25b) → Extraposition. A child is normally exposed to sentences like this.
How, then, is the knowledge of a language acquired?
Generative grammarians, in relation to this question. They propose that human beings have a genetic endowment (an innate language acquisition device) that enables them to learn languages. They try to characterize it. This is usually referred to as universal grammar.
Principles are rigid. They are invariable. They define what is common to all human languages. Principles include all those linguistic features that do not vary cross-linguistically.
Parameters , on the other hand, concern properties of language which are subject to cross- linguistic variation. Parameters correspond to those features in respect to which individual languages differ.
In other words, what the generative grammarian holds is that human beings know, from birth, a set of principles common to all languages and parameters that vary from one language to another.
(28) → That model, the model of acquisition, the way in which the language is acquired is not one in which linguistic knowledge emerges simply from the input provided by the linguistic environment to which a child is exposed. Rather, it is a model in which Universal Grammar interrupts with the linguistic exp to give rise to, to generate, a specific grammar of a language.
Principles of the Universal Grammar
One of the principles of the Universal Grammar is that the construction of any syntactic construction are endocentric : all syntactic constructions are organized around a head element.
However, languages differ with respect to the order of elements of this syntactic constructions. In some languages, the head goes before the elements that accompany it, there are languages in which the head follows the rest of the elements. This is called the head parameter (29). Two basic types of languages: SPO (or head-first, like English or Spanish) and SOP languages (or head-last languages, like Turkish).
Another parameter is the pro-drop parameter (30): the subject is absent in finite sentences. Spanish is an example of a pro-drop language, or null subject language. English, however, is not an example of pro-drop language. English is a non-null subject language : English sentences must always have a subject, even if it doesn’t add any information (31).
The role of contrastive studies in present generative grammar
The use of the comparative method helps these linguists to characterize the genetic involvement of the universal grammar that enables us to learn a language.
Some notes from the exercises:
Reverse construction verbs
They are semantically alike, but from a syntactic point of view, they do not characterize the same elements. This term was introduced by Whitley.
Complementizer → que, it introduces a NP Relative → La chica que vi ayer
