Contrastive linguistics: Approaches and methods theoretical foundations
tải về 25.4 Kb.
|
| Microlinguistic analysis
In their effort to reach a reliable contrast of two or more languages, CA linguists set fixed linguistic categories to describe the different languages in an attempt to have constant factors. On the microlinguistic level, the language variables are organized according to three levels- phonology, grammar and lexis-and categories- unit, structure, class and system. In the traditional approach of analysis, the linguistic level was described separately without reference to other levels, describing phonological features did not include any reference to grammatical ones, for example. Then merging the description of different levels was found later to be inevitable. In Hetzron (1972 cited in James, 1980) homonymy which was given as a reason to support the syntactic order in Russian. The principle of linguistic level is analyzed by CA to observe the shift from one level to the other. For example, Russian questions are distinguished by their intonations while English questions are formed by the fronting of verb do syntactically. This is described as „a phonology-to-grammar level shift‟. Grammatical level In the pursuit of reaching fixed organizational framework for the description of languages, Halliday (1961 in James, 1980) set four grammatical categories- unit, structure, class and system- that he described as “universal, necessary and sufficient” for describing any language. The unit category includes the sentence as the biggest unit of analysis which is then followed by clause, phrase, word and morpheme. From this perspective, CA therefore does not analyze more than the sentence level. It may observe, for example, that the same sentence has different number of clauses across the two languages. Structure is the second category and it refers to the order of the components in the sentence structurally or that of sounds in a word phonologically. In English for example the sentence is composed of subject predicate, compliment, and adjunct and phonologically words can be cccvc or vccv. The adjective in French occurs in a post-nominal position while in English it is pre-nominal. The third category „Class‟ depends on the place a specific unit may occupy in the sentence structure, eg. Any phrase that can occupy the adjunct is considered one of the class of the „Adverbial phrase‟. The last category System includes a variety of options for the same element that can occupy the same place in the sentence, such as plural and singular nouns in English. In Arabic there is also dual. tải về 25.4 Kb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
|