[其它]Unit_1_Contrastive_Linguistics.ppt

Contrastive Linguistics,Instructor: Wei Zaijiang 魏在江,Wei Zai-jiang 魏在江 Tel(o) 西安外国语大学学报编辑部 E-mail:,Content,An introduction to contrastive linguistics includes definitions; background the influence of linguistics, philosophy, sociology and sociolinguistics on the development of contrastive linguistics, and central concepts-.etc.,An examination of the analytical frameworks in grammar, vocabulary, pragmatic and textual contrastive studies will be discussed in details. The discussion also covers implications of contrastive linguistics in ESP text studies, EFL teaching, Translation studies and literature studies.,Approach,The module will combine lectures with practical activity and discussion. Participants will be expected to do a considerable amount of practical work on the local texts during the module. The module will be assessed in terms of assignment.,Syllabus,Unit 1: General introduction Unit 2: Principles and Procedures Unit 3: Phonetic & Phonological Contrastive Studies Unit 4: Lexical Contrastive Analysis Unit 5:Grammatical Contrastive Analysis Unit 6: Pragmatic Contrastive studies Unit 7:Textual Contrastive Analysis,Unit 8:Cognitive linguistics and Contrastive linguistics Unit 9:Cultural differences in English and Chinese Unit 10: Contrastive Linguistics and translation Unit 11: contrastive linguistics and Foreign language teaching Unit 12:corpus linguistics and contrastive linguistics,Workshops and seminars:,1. Case studies: text analysis 2. Case studies: problems in foreign language teaching and translation,Basic reading:,Andrew Chesterman.Contrastive Functional Analysis.John Benjamins.1998 Brown,G. & Yule G.Discourse Analysis.CUP.1983 Carl James.Contrastive Analysis.Longman.1980 Keping.Contrastive Linguistics.Nanjing Normal University.1999,M.A.K.Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan.Cohesion in English.1976 Robert Lado.Linguistics Across cultures.The University of Michigan Press.957 Saussure. The Course of General Linguistics. Beijing:Foreign Language teaching and Research Press.2002 Tomasz P.Krzeszowski.Contrasting Languages-The Scope of Contrastive Linguistics.,Mouton De Gruyter.1990 许余龙对比语言学上海外语教育出版社 2002年版（研究生教材） 陈治安、刘家荣、文旭.英汉对比语用学与外语教学.北京：外语教学与研究出版社.2003 高 远.对比分析与错误分析.北京航空航天大学出版社.2002 潘文国.汉英语对比纲要.北京语言文化大学出版社.2003,杨自俭.英汉对比研究论文集.上海外语教育出版社.1994 杨自俭.英汉比较与翻译（3，4，5）.上海外语教育出版社 喻荣根.英汉对比语言学.北京工业大学出版社.1989 何善芬.英汉语言对比研究.上海外语教育出版社.2002,李瑞华.英汉语言与文化对比研究.上海外语教育出版社.1998 连叔能.英汉对比研究.高等教育出版社.1994 邵志洪.英汉语研究与对比.华东理工大学出版社.1997 杨自俭.英汉比较与翻译（3，4，5）.上海外语教育出版社 喻荣根.英汉对比语言学.北京工业大学出版社.1989 杨自俭.英汉比较与翻译（3，4，5）.上海外语教育出版社,Unit 1 Introduction,1.1 What is Contrastive Linguistics? When we take up any subject for study, we usually start by investigating its nature, its relevance to us, and the way to study it. In other words, we ask three basic questions: (a) what it is,(b)why it is needed or important, and (c) how to do it. In this section we shall try to answer these three basic questions about contrastive linguistics.,1.1.1 Name and Nature,Apparently contrastive linguistics, is something related to or included under linguistics. So let us, as the saying goes, begin from the very beginning and examination of the name and nature of linguistics.,Linguistics,Language is used by us everyday. It is a reality, that is, it is something actually or experienced by us. Generally speaking, we may distinguish three aspects of reality, physical, social, and psychological-.,and at least five modes of or approaches to knowing reality, that is, philosophical, mathematical, theological, humanistic, and scientific. Various disciplines, in light of the aspects of reality they are interested in, approach their subject matter largely from the point of view of one of these five modes,We may consider the following facts about language and approaches to the reality of language before we come to characterize the nature of linguistics. (1) Language is socially acquired and used. As a social phenomenon, it obviously has social reality.,(1)As human behavior, language has psychological reality. Two major linguistic schools in the 20th century have been structural linguistics and generative linguistics. Both of them analyze language in terms of human behavior(that is, verbal behavior”_structural linguist Skinner wrote a book in this very title.” (2) Philosophical, mathematical and theological approaches to the reality of language are evidently relevant only in rather limited ways.,(1) Neither is a humanistic approach of much use to the linguists. The humanistic approach lays emphasis on the individual characteristics. The typical method it employs is called verstechen(understand from within). What is left, then, is the scientific approach. Linguistics claims to be an empirical science and as such it aims at true(in the sense of verifiable and falsifiable) statements by means of formulating testable hypotheses.,(1) Based on the analysis made above of the features of language and the relevant approaches to it, we may depict the nature of linguistics as follows: Linguistics is a scientific study of language, which exists mainly as social and psychological realities.,1.1.1. 2Contrastive Linguistics,What, then, is contrastive linguistics? Apparently, contrastive linguistics is a kind of or a branch of linguistics. As its name suggests, contrastive linguistics involves contrast or comparison. Comparison is one of the basic ways by which we study objects and get to know them, just as the saying goes,?only by comparison can one distinguish.” The method of comparison is widely used in linguistics.,Almost all the branches of linguistics involve comparison of one kind or another, since to identify and elaborate on a particular feature of the human language, linguists usually have to make an explicit or implicit comparative or contrastive analysis of the various forms in which the feature finds expression and the parallels of these forms in some related systems.,We may come to a better understanding of the nature of contrastive linguistics by putting it in the perspective of a general framework of comparisons and between languages. Comparison may be conducted intralingually or interlingually on a synchronic basis or on a diachronic basis. So four types of comparison may be distinguished:,(1)Synchronic intralingual comparison. This is the comparison of the constituent forms of the phonetic, phonological, lexical, grammatical and other linguistic systems within a particular language during a specific period of its evolution.,(2)Diachronic intralingual comparison. This kind of comparison occurs where the history of a given language is involved. A diachronic comparison of English, for instance, reveals that the language has undergone four stages of evolvement: Old English(up to 1150), Middle English(1150-1500), Early English(1500-1700) and Late Modern English(1700 onwards),with its grammar becoming increasingly analytic, that is, the number of inflected word endings drastically decreased and grammatical meanings are increasingly expressed by word order and function words such as prepositions. Diachronic intralingual comparison is the principal method employed by the researchers of language history, etymology and other related branches of linguistic study.,(3)Diachronic interlingual comparison. When comparison crosses language borders, we get a very important branch of linguistics that developed in modern times. This is the so-called (comparative) historic linguistics (also known as philology which stated in the late 18th century and evolved into a dominant branch of linguistic study in the 19th century.,4)Synchronic interlingual comparison. According to the purpose of comparison, three kinds of it may be distinguished:(a)the first kind of synchronic interlingual comparison is carried out with a view to finding out the common features of and the laws governing the structures of all the languages in the world. Its goal, in other words, is to find out the “language universals” or “linguistic universals”,This is something which generative schools of linguistics headed by Transformational grammar have been endeavoring to do (b)The second kind of synchronic interlingual comparison is conducted for the aim of finding out the typical differences between all the languages in the world in their structure so that these languages can be classified according to their formal features.,(c) The third kind of synchronic interlingual comparison is conducted within the scope of usually two languages, although more languages may be involved. The aim of this kind of comparison is to find out the discrepancies and, to a lesser degree, the similarities in the structures of the languages being compared. This is exactly what contrastive linguistics undertakes to do(Xu,1992:3-4),We may then characterize contrastive linguistics in the following way: Contrastive linguistics is a branch of linguistics which studies two or more languages synchronically, with the aims of discovering their differences and similarities(especially the former) and applying these findings to related areas of study.,Contrastive linguistics is also known as “contrastive analysis”(CA) or “contrastive studies”. These three terms are largely interchangeable.,1.1.1 Classification,Having identified the nature of contrastive linguistics as well as the status it keeps in the broad area of language studies, it is appropriate now for us to take a look at the make-up of this branch of linguistics. We may classify contrastive linguistics along two axes, i.e. theoretical vs practical, and microlinguistics vs. macrolinguistics,This approach, called :linguistic typology”, has established a classificatory system for the languages of the world into which individual languages can be slotted according to their preferred grammatical devices: so now we can talk about “synthetic”,”analytic”,”inflectional, “agglutinating” and “tone” language, Theoretical and Applied Contrastive Linguistics,Theoretical contrastive linguistics tries to find suitable models and theoretical frameworks for comparison and to establish such key notions as congruence, similarity, and equivalence between the forms of different languages.,Applied contrastive linguistics has as its objective the application of the finding of theoretical contrastive linguistics to the contrasting of two or more languages for certain practical purposes, notably L2(ones second or foreign language) teaching and learning,translation,bilingual;lexicography,etc.,Applied contrastive linguistics differs from theoretical contrastive linguistics in that it is preoccupied with the problem of how a universal category X, realized in language A as Xa, is rendered in language B(Xb), instead of with the way in which some general linguistic characteristics are realized in two or more languages:,It can be seen that applied contrastive linguistics is unidirectional whereas theoretical contrastive linguistics is bi-directional or multidirectional.,Contrastive linguistics, like descriptive and historical linguistics, is dependent on theoretical linguistics since no exact and reliable exploration of facts can be conducted without a theoretical background, providing concepts, hypotheses, and theories which enable the investigator to describe the relevant facts and to account for them in terms of significant generalizations.,But contrastive linguistics is also dependent on descriptive linguistics since no comparison of languages is possible without their prior description .In brief, then, contrastive linguistics is an area of linguistics in which a linguistic theory is applied to a comparative description of two or more languages, which need to be genetically or typologically related. The success of these comparisons is strictly dependent on the theory applied.,Micro-contrastive and Macro-contrastive Linguistics,As we know too well, a linguistic system is made up of many layers or levels. These layers or levels are often considered to form a scale or hierarchy from lower levels containing the smallest linguistic units to higher levels containing larger linguistic units. So we have, from the lowest to the highest, such levels as phonetic level, phonological level, morphemic level, lexical level, syntactic level, textual level and pragmatic level.,According to the levels on which it is enacted, contrastive linguistics may also be divided into micro-contrastive and macro-contrastive branches. Micro-contrastive linguistics is the traditional or “classic” kind of contrastive linguistics. It is “code-oriented”, that is, oriented towards the contrast about langue (the system of a language) or “Competence”,which, in Transformational Grammar(TG), means a persons internalized grammar or ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before.,The goal of micro-contrastive linguistics is to compare the universal as well as particular structural properties of human languages. Specifically, it concentrates on the four linguistic levels of phonetics, phonology, lexis and grammar.,Macro-contrastive linguistics represents a broader perspective of linguistic analysis and a relatively new departure in “pure” and applied linguistics. It offers considerable scope for new work in contrastive linguistics.,The goal of macro-contrastive linguistics is to compare and understand how people use different languages to communicate with each other. Specifically, it concentrates on two higher levels in linguistic description, that is, textual and pragmatic (James,1980:61),In the treatment of our subject we shall divide our time between these two areas of contrastive linguistics, with as much attention as possible paid to the practical side of the topics under purview.,Since text is coming increasingly to the fore in linguistic and translation studies, we shall devote a substantial amount of space to it, on the belief that this will considerably aid in the improvement of the proficiency in both translation and writing of our readers.,1.2 Why Contrastive Linguistics? Having answered the question of “what”, we are now in the position to take up the question of “why”, that is, why do we need contrastive linguistics? It seems that we need this study for at least two reasons, one theoretical, and the other practical.,First, viewed from a theoretical perspective, contrastive linguistics is indispensable to the development of general linguistics. We know that most modern linguistic theories thus far proposed are based upon the study of western languages. Different models of language can describe certain features of language more successfully than other models.,The second reason for which contrastive linguistics is meaningful to us that the study of contrastive data might suggest solutions to various practical linguistic problems we may face, especially those which cannot be solved without the analysis of evidence from more than one language. Translation, for example, is a field of study with abundant problems of that kind.,It is perceivable, as we have demonstrated thus far, that for the solution of both theoretical and practical problems regarding language, findings obtained from contrastive analysis may just be indispensable.,1.1 History and development of contrastive linguistics,Contrastive linguistics originated in the United States during WWII. At that time, a lot of immigrants rushed into the United States from different parts of the world to stay away from the war. They had to master English in order to make a new start in an alien country. Later, when the United States stepped into the war after the,Japanese surprise attack on Pearl harbour, a large group of American soldiers were required to learn some ABCs of the languages of the belligerent states within the shortest possible time. Thus the urgent need to learn foreign languages gave rise to the problem of how to teach a foreign language in a most effective and economical way. The solution found to the problem was contrastive linguistics.,Fries(1945:9)writes:”The most efficient teaching materials are those based on a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner.” The psychological theory underlying this approach to language teaching was that of stimulus-response and associative learning of behaviorism.,The past two decades saw new developments of contrastive linguistics in many countries in the world, not only in Europe and the United States, but also in such countries as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Jordan,etc. Since 1975 a number of international conferences and symposiums on contrastive linguistics have been held in the United States, Romania Poland, Germany, and Finland. Many contrastive libraries and monographs have been published.,Contrastive linguistics has also engaged the attention of Chinese Scholars. As early as in 1933, Chao Yuan Ren（赵元任） carried out a contrastive study of English and Chinese intonation. In recent years, many universities began to offer courses in contrastive linguistics and quite a number of research works have been published, notably Xu Yulong,Wang Fuxiang, Yu yungen, Pan Wenguo,Shao Zhihong, He Shan fen,etc .,So, although contrastive analysis has been fraught with problems regarding its basis in the last few decades, it remains, paradoxically, highly vigorous. This is not hard to understand: for language workers, learners as well as teachers of foreign languages, it is the plausible and obvious things to do. It is sound practice in search of a sound theory.,Comparative and contrastive,Generally speaking, the term of “comparative” and the termcontrastive” means differently. In the field of linguistics, in terms of “comparative linguistics”, it is intended to make a diachronic study of some related languages so as to create a parent language or a