Ngôn ngữ đối chiếu - Contrastive Linguistics - Tài liệu học cao học

Tài liệu contrastive linguistic (Ngôn ngữ học đối chiếu) dành cho tất cả các sinh viên đại học và cao học. Tài liệu chi tiết và đầy đủ, bao gồm các slide trình chiếu rõ ràng và tài liệu tham khảo đính kèm

CONTRASTIVE

LINGUISTICS

MA Students of English-Vietnamese Contrastive Linguistics

- understanding the nature of CL;

- analyzing similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese;

- applying to teaching translation and analyzing errors

1.Bùi Mạnh Hùng (2008) NGÔN NGỮ HỌC ĐỐI CHIẾU, NXB Giáo dục.

2.Chesterman, Andrew (1998) CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS, John Benjamins

Publishing Company, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia.

3.James, Carl (1992) CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS, Longman, London and New York.

4.Lado, Robert (1957) LINGUISTICS ACROSS CULTURES, Michigan University Press

(NGÔN NGỮ HỌC QUA CÁC NỀN VĂN HOÁ (2002) Bản dịch của Hoàng Văn Vân,

NXB ĐHQG Hà Nội).

5.Lê Quang Thiêm (1989 tái bản và bổ sung năm 2005) NGHIÊN CỨU ĐỐI CHIẾU CÁC

NGÔN NGỮ, NXBĐHQG-Hà Nội.

6.Nguyễn Văn Chiến (1992) NGÔN NGỮ HỌC ĐỐI CHIẾU VÀ ĐỐI CHIẾU CÁC NGÔN

NGỮ ĐÔNG NAM Á, Viện KHXHVN, Viện Đông Nam Á - Hà Nội.

7.Nguyễn Thiện Giáp (2009) CÁC PHƯƠNG PHÁP NGHIÊN CỨU NGÔN NGỮ HỌC, NXB

Gíao dục-Hà Nội

8 Krzeszowski, Tomasz P (1990) CONTRASTING LANGUAGES: THE SCOPE OF

CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS, Mouton de Gruyter, NY

9.Trần Hữu Mạnh (2007) NGÔN NGỮ HỌC ĐỐI CHIẾU - CÚ PHÁP TIẾNG ANH - TIẾNG

VIỆT, NXB ĐHQG Hà Nội.

1.Active participation: 20%

1.Introduction to Contrastive Linguistics

1.1.Historical development of Contrastive

Linguistics

1.1.1.Contrastive analysis is a relatively modern discipline, emerging as a

major linguistic tool during and after World War Two, particularly in the United States in the context of second and foreign language teaching, but it has antecedents

- Contrastive analysis at its strongest, however, began to develop in the

1930s, and the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1941: 240) foresaw its place as a successor to the comparative study of languages

1.1.2.Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of

language change It has five main concerns:

• to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages

• to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their

relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics)

• to develop general theories about how and why language changes

• to describe the history of speech communities

• to study the history of words, i.e etymology

1.1.3 Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of

historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their

historical relatedness.

Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language , and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families , to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages

Scholars were concerned chiefly with establishing language families and

reconstructing prehistoric proto-languages, using the comparative method and

internal reconstruction The focus was initially on the well-known

Indo-European languages , many of which had long written histories; the scholars also studied the Uralic languages , another European language family for which less early written material exists Since then, there has been significant comparative linguistic work expanding outside of European languages as well, such as on the

Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages , among many others

1.1.4.The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or more languages using techniques such as the comparative method

In principle, every difference between two related languages should be

explicable to a high degree of plausibility, and systematic changes, for

example in phonological or morphological systems, are expected to be

highly regular (i.e consistent)

In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g just to the lexicon

In some methods it may be possible to reconstruct an earlier

proto-language Although the proto-languages reconstructed by the comparative method are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive power

•

1.Introduction to Contrastive

Linguistics

1.2.Theoretical Background

1.2.1.CL based its theory on transfer theory of behaviorism in

psychology The psychological basis of CL is Transfer Theory, elaborated

and formulated within a Stimulus (S) – Response (S) (Behaviorist) theory of psychology: “One explanation [of L2 errors] is that the learner is carrying over the habits of his mother tongue into the second language Clearly, this explanation is related to a view of language as some sort of habit-structure”

CL was used extensively in the field of Second Language Acquisition

(SLA) in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a method of explaining why some features of a Target Language were more difficult to acquire than others According to the behaviourist theories prevailing at the time, language

learning was a question of habit formation, and this could be reinforced or impeded by existing habits Therefore, the difficulty in mastering certain structures in a second language (L2) depended on the difference between the learners' mother language (L1) and the language they were trying to

learn

1.2.1.1.Charles C Fries whose Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign

Language was published in 1945 stated that the learner was likely to

transfer rules about language internalized from the learning of his/her L1 to the L2, and that mistakes in the L2 were due to this inappropriate

transference One could therefore prevent development of errors through a prior contrastive analysis and error analysis, leading to the development of appropriate teaching materials to reinforce correct language learning.

“Learning a second language…constitutes a very different task from

learning the first language The basic problems arise not out of any

essential difficulty in the features of the new language themselves but

primarily out of the special “set” created by the first language habits”.

The existence of cross-linguistic differences made second language

acquisition extremely different from first language acquisition.

1.2.1.2.Robert Lado in Linguistics Across Cultures (1957) claimed: “We

assume that the student who comes in contact with a foreign language will find some features of it quite easy and others extremely difficult Those

elements that are similar to his native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult The teacher who has

made a comparison of the foreign language with the native language of the students will know better what the real learning problems are and can

better provide for teaching them”.

“L2 learners will tend to transfer to their L2 utterances the formal features

of their L1, that means: “individuals tend to transfer the forms and

meanings and the distribution of forms and meanings of their native

language and culture to the foreign language and culture” (Lado, 1957)

1.2.2.Contrastive linguistics based its theory on structuralism.

1.2.2.1.From Pre-Structuralism to Structuralism to Post-Structuralism

• A Pre-structuralist theory assumes that there is an intimate connection

between material objects in the world and the languages that we use to talk about those objects and their interrelations

• B Structuralism originated in the early 1900s, in the structural

linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure Structuralism is a theoretical

paradigm emphasizing that elements of culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure Structuralism is "the belief that phenomena of human life are not

intelligible except through their interrelations These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture"

1.2.2.2.Structuralism: Early in the 20th century, Saussure introduced the idea

of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them

- By introducing a distinction between diachronic to synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics

- Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still foundational in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm ,

- and the langue - parole distinction , distinguishing language as an abstract

system (langue) from language as a concrete manifestation of this system

(parole).

- Substantial additional contributions following Saussure's definition of a

structural approach to language came from The Prague school, Leonard

Bloomfield, Charles F Hockett, Louis Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson.

 In brief, de Saussure's structural linguistics propounded three related

concepts

• a) De Saussure argued for a distinction between langue (an idealized

abstraction of language) and parole (language as actually used in daily life)

• b) He argued that the "sign" was composed of both a signified, an abstract

concept or idea, and a "signifier", the perceived sound/visual image

Because different languages have different words to describe the same objects or concepts, there is no intrinsic reason why a specific sign is used

to express a given signifier It is thus "arbitrary"

• c) Signs thus gain their meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs

According to Saussure's structuralist theory of language, the meaning of a term (a word or expression) does not begin and end with the speaker's

experience or intention

In other words, the meaning of a particular term in a language is due to its relative difference from all other terms in the language

A signified, i.e a concept or idea, is properly understood in terms of its

position relative to the differences among a range of other signifiers (words with different positions in the network (langue) and, hence, different

meanings)

 The Significance of Structuralist Theory

• The first thing to notice is that, according to structuralist theory, meaning is not a private experience, but the product of a shared system of signification A text is to

be understood as a construct to be analyzed and explained scientifically in terms of the deep-structure of the system itself For many structuralists, this "deep-

structure" is universal and innate.

• Second we should note that in structuralism, the individual is more a product of the system than a producer of it Language precedes us It is the medium of thought and human expression Thus, it provides us with the structure that we use to

conceptualize our own experience.

• And third, since language is arbitrary, there is no natural bond between words and things, there can be no privileged connection between language and reality In this sense, reality is also produced by language Thus, structuralism can be understood

as a form of idealism.

• According to structuralist theory, a text or utterance has a "meaning", but its meaning is determined not by the psychological state or "intention" of the speaker, but by the deep-structure of the language system in which it occurs In this way, the subject (individual or "author") is effectively killed off and replaced by language itself as an autonomous system of rules Thus, structuralism has been characterized as anti-humanistic in it's claim that meaning is not identical with the inner psychological experience of the

speaker It removes the human subject from its central position in the

production of meaning much

C In the late 1950s and early '60s, when structural linguistics was facing serious

challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance, an array

of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their

respective fields of study French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in Structuralism

* Poststructuralist theory denies the distinction between signifier and signified

According to the poststructuralist, concepts are nothing more than words If a

word's meaning is solely the result of its difference from other words, then the

meaning (the concept or signified) is not an additional thing "present" in the sign itself On the contrary, "meaning" (if it can be called that at all) is the ever-moving play of difference from signifier to signifier; a slipping from word to word in which each word retains relations to ("traces" of) the words that differ from it.

1 Meaning is never fully present in any one signifier, but is infinitely deferred or suspended.

2 Meaning is contextual, i.e affected by related words.

3 There is always an excess of meaning.

languages Generative theory is modularist and formalist in character

Chomsky built on earlier work of Zellig Harris to formulate the generative

theory of language

• According to this theory the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules universal for all humans and underlying the grammars of all human

languages This set of rules is called Universal Grammar , and for Chomsky

describing it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics For this reason the grammars of individual languages are of importance to linguistics only in so far as they allow us to discern the universal underlying rules from which the observable linguistic variability is generated.

• Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar The term "generative grammar" is used

in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics"

therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.

• Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit It is a

finite set of rules that can be applied to generate all those and only those

sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical

in a given language This is the definition that is offered by Noam Chomsky, who invented the term [1] , and by most dictionaries of linguistics It is important to note that generate is being used as a technical term with a particular sense To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar "assigns a structural description" to the sentence.[2]

•

• The term generative grammar is also used to label the approach to

linguistics taken by Chomsky and his followers

• Chomsky's approach is characterised by the use of transformational

grammar – a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated

by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures – and by the assertion of

a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same)

• The term "generative linguistics" is often applied to the earliest version of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated with a

distinction between the "deep structure" and "surface structure" of

sentences

• In the classic formalization of generative grammars first proposed by

Noam Chomsky in the 1950s,a grammar G consists of the following

components:

- A finite set N of non-terminal symbols, none of which appear in strings

formed from G.

- A finite set of terminal symbols that is disjoint from N.

- A finite set P of production rules, that map from one string of symbols to

another

- A formal description of language attempts to replicate a speaker's

knowledge of the rules of their language, and the aim is to produce a set of rules that is minimally sufficient to successfully model valid linguistic forms

C.2 Functionalism

C.2.1.Functional theories of language propose that since language is

fundamentally a tool, it is reasonable to assume that its structures are best analyzed and understood with reference to the functions they carry out

• Functional theories of grammar differ from formal theories of grammar, in that the latter seeks to define the different elements of language and

describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, whereas the former defines the functions performed by

language and then relates these functions to the linguistic elements that carry them out This means that functional theories of grammar tend to pay attention to the way language is actually used, and not just to the

formal relations between linguistic elements

• Functional theories then describe language in term of functions existing on all levels of language.

- Phonological function: the function of the phoneme is to distinguish

between different lexical material

- Semantic function: (Agent, Patient, Recipient, etc.), describing the role of participants in states of affairs or actions expressed

- Syntactic functions: (e.g Subject and Object), defining different

perspectives in the presentation of a linguistic expression

- Pragmatic functions: (eg.Theme and Rheme, Topic and Focus, Predicate), defining the informational status of constituents, determined by the

pragmatic context of the verbal interaction

• Functional descriptions of grammar strive to explain how linguistic

functions are performed in communication through the use of linguistic forms