对比语言学 柯平连淑能读书报告

Reading report of contrastive linguistics

As a reading report of Contrastive Linguistics, this essay is divided into two parts. In the first part, I would have a detailed summary of this book which consists of two parts. In the second part, I will introduce some issues I am interested in, and have a brief introduction of current preview of these issues.

I hope that this reading report would make contribution to the development of related studies.

Here, I extend my sincere thanks to the teacher of this course, XiongLiqing.

Ⅰ. Detail summary of this book.

In this summary, I would divide the whole seven chapters into two parts. The first part contains the first two chapters in this book, the remaining parts make up another part.

The first part introduced basic knowledge of contrastive linguistics, and the subject of our study.

As we all know, linguistics is a scientific study of language, which exists mainly as social and psychological realities. Apparently, contrastive linguistics is a branch of linguistics. We can understanding its nature easily by what its name indicates—“contrastive”, that is to say, its nature is comparisons within and between languages. This branch of linguistics can be

divided into two axes, theoretical vs. practical, and microlinguistic vs. macrolinguistic. The difference between theoretical and applied is that the former is bidirectional, the later is unidirectional. Micro-contrastive linguistics concentrates on four linguistic levels of phonetics, phonology, lexis and grammar, while macro-contrastive linguistics only concerns two higher levels—textual and pragmatic. The contrastive linguistics exists because it has great importance.

Theoretically speaking, it is an indispensable to the development of linguistics; practically speaking, it might solve some linguistic problems which cannot be solved with one language.

As for the history of contrastive linguistics, it is American anthropologist B.L.Whorf who first introduced it, it is until https://www.360docs.net/doc/1814251130.html,do who published the book Linguistics Across Cultures that contrastive linguistics became a independent subject, “a new field of applied linguistics”, he issued. Contrastive linguistics became an independent subject in China until 1970s, its development came to a new stage in 1990s.

Since we have known the backgrounds of this study, it would be an appropriate time to know some principles and procedures of contrastive linguistics.

Through learning of Transfer, which is divided into positive transfer and negative transfer.

We have also known another two important principles: (1) contrastive

analysis is always predictive, and that the job of diagnosis belongs to the field of Error Analysis; (2) contrastive linguistics can be expected to predict these errors, but it will not claim or be able to predict the order 50% or 60% of learner errors. As for comparison criteria, the sameness come as constant while the difference as variables. Constant has traditionally been known as tertium comparationis in the theory of contrastive linguistics. Surface structure and deep structure are also quoted in this book to help us learn, which might be considered as a criteria of comparison. Since there are so many differences in two languages, we should pay attention to the real equivalence of translation, both in surface and deep. That?s to say, for two sentences from different languages to be translationally equivalent they must convey the same referential and pragmatic and interlingual meanings. The procedure of contrastive analysis involves two stages: the stage of description when each of the two languages is described on the appropriate level; then comes the stage of juxtaposition for comparison. As what is summarized that it will frequently be necessary to cross hierachical levels since different languages don?t express the same grammatical meaning in the same level. The second part of the summary which contains the left five chapters deals with contrastive linguistics at various linguistic levels.

In chapter three, the book first issued what are phonetics and phonology. What are they? The phonetics refers to the physical production of sounds, which has two categories according to where and how the sounds are

produced. The phonology studies the specific sounds employed in different languages. Obviously, these two also do to the contrastive linguistics.

As we all know, phonetics has 3branches, articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics, while there two approaches to phonetic contrastive analysis, the first is physiological and the second is physical. This book just wrote one notion that is important to the phonological contrastive analysis—Functional load. At the end of the chapter three, the author introduced suprasegmental contrastive analysis. He also dealt with three terms—pitch, tone and intonation. Pitch is an important category in the phonological system of Chinese and English suprasegmentals.

Chapter four is a detailed introduction of lexicology morphology. In this chapter, the book told the two divisions of lexical contrastive analysis—contrastive lexical morphology and contrastive lexical semantics. At the end of this chapter, the book summarized which three areas have the lexical contrastive analysis been active to attach its academic and practicable influences.

We all know the definition of morphology and morphemes for our previous study, as well as their category. But all that is the background of our current learning. A comparison of the constitution of English and Chinese word stocks will tell us something important. For example, Chinese consists of two kinds of words：mono-morphemic words and multi-morphemic words. The former accounts for 80% of the total vocabulary of modern Chinese, while the

other only 20%. However, derivatives and compounds are in the ratio of about 1:1 in English. These two pairs of figures indicate that lexical system of Chinese is much more analytic (isolating) than that of English, which is more synthetic.

Contrastive lexical semantics in this book told several contrasts between English and Chinese. First, on the basis of motivation of words, the book came to a natural conclusion after the comparison of German, English and Chinese that Chinese, at least the modern Chinese is a quite markedly morphologically motivated language than English. On the basis of sense relations, the book introduced a kind of phenomenon called lexical gap. For example, different kinds of boiled or steamed stuffed wheaten food in Chinese has different name：饺子and 馄炖，but in English, there is one name only-dumpling.

As we have dealt with derivational morphology in the previous chapter, what should be told about is inflectional morphology and syntax. In fact, this chapter is separated into two parts. First, we will make a brief account of contrastive analysis on the level of inflectional morphology. Second, we will introduce several linguistic schools of the present day.

Familiar grammatical categories or contrast include aspect, case, gender, mood, number, person, tense, and voice.Here, I just quote some points concluded from the book.

Aspect--Chinese has a developed aspect system. Like English, it

distinguishes the perfective aspect from the progressive aspect Case—typical formal contrasts in European languages are between the several: the nominative, the accusative, the dative, the genitive, the vocative, the ablative.

Gender—a grammatical distinction in which words are marked according to a distinction between masculine, feminine and sometimes neuter. Mood—typical contrasts are made between the indicative, the subjunctive and the imperative.

Number—sometime, a countable word in Chinese may be uncountable in English.

Tense—one thing that distinguishes Chinese verbs and English verbs is that English verbs conjugate to show different tenses, whereas Chinese verbs, having no conjugations, but depends on adverbs to mark the tense.

V oice—there are four devices employed both in English and Chinese to perform the same function in voice. However, the differences are still existed. In Chinese, inflection is used to indicate the location of a noun; while in English, it occurs only with the subjective and the objective cases, e.g. he/him. In the second part of this chapter, the book discussed the contrastive analysis in these ways: structuralist approaches and generative approaches. In structuralist approaches, we can get two conclusions from the book. First, in the IC branching diagram, language is structured on two axes, a horizontal one delineating construction-type, and a vertical one defining sets of possible

fillers for each position: the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes respectively. Second, English uses function words called articles to carry some certain meaning, while Chinese and Russian achieve the same contrasts through word order.

Last, there are some certain weaknesses in the structuralist model that structuralist models confine themselves to observations about the surface structure: this is the root of their problems.

In this section, we will consider contrastive analysis on the models of Transformational Grammatical and Case Grammar. As Chomsky changed his theory over years, we can get that grammar is a tripartition of syntax, semantics, and phonetics. Contrast to the TG, some linguistics put forward the Case Grammar, one of the semantics-based models for grammatical analysis. Case Grammar is a theory of syntax and semantics in which nouns in deep structures are said to be related to verbs in cases such as object, dative, instrumental, and so on. One of its problems is that sometimes it may cause ambiguity in sentences.

The above five chapters are discussing about the micro-linguistics. In chapter six and chapter seven, we are going to study macro-linguistics contrastive analysis. Scholars from many disciplines search for larger linguistics units and structures with their own models and goals, but their common concern is that they stress the need to see language as a dynamic, social, interactive phenomenon- whether between speaker and listener, or

writer and reader. What it argued that meaning is not only conveyed by single sentences, but also by some personal factors, such as beliefs, knowledge and even the situation in which they interact. Compare the goal of macro-linguistics with the code linguistics`, we may notice that the attention has been shifted from the code to the progress of communication. Hymes proposes that the object of linguistic enquiry should be communicative competence. We can sum up three characteristics. (a) A concern for communicative competence rather than for “linguistics”competence in Chomsky`s sense. (b) An attempt to describe linguistic events within their extralinguistics settings. (c) The search for units of linguistic organization larger than the single sentence. Text is a piece of spoken or written language which concerns about competence while discourse is related to performance. There seems to three approaches to the use of text analysis and discourse analysis, one of the three tends to see the two terms are complementary which also have been adopted for our present work. In the chapter six, we shall be concerned with contrastive text analysis, discourse analysis will be dealt with in the chapter seven (“Pragmatic Contrastive Analysis”).

We will define the Text with its two important characteristics—Cohesion and Coherence.

Coherence refers to the structural and /or semantic relationships between the different elements of a text. It is understood in both narrow and broad senses-Semantic cohesion and Structural Coherence. Respectively, Semantic

Cohesion has five devices to achieve it, as Halliday and Hasan identify, that is reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical relationships. As for Structural Cohesion, it is typically achieved through three devices: parallelism, comparison, and informational structure. Obviously, different languages have preferences for certain of these devices and neglect certain others, that why Contrastive Analysis of Textual Coherence come into being. One of its aims is to find out the different ways which different languages conventionally use to organize a group of concepts and propositions into an organic whole to convey a specific meaning. Different modes of thoughts also have influences on the way a language conventionally uses to organize their spoken and written text. For this Kaplan concluded a diagram which demonstrates how people with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds tend to think. From that diagram, we can make a comparison English text and Chinese text.

English writings are organized in this way. Typically, they will start with an introductory paragraph to state what the writer will concerned with in the whole work, the rest paragraphs will organized around the subject proposed at the start. The paragraphs hold the same. Each paragraph often started with a topic sentence, and remaining part would provide evidence to support it. In this way, the whole text appears to be built up along a direct line.

The Chinese is different. No matter in the early stage of Chinese civilization, Ming-Qing dynasties, or in some modern publicity materials,

Chinese text always written in a suggestively way. So a Chinese student can not ignore the differences between these two languages if he/she wants to write idiomatic English.

To sum up, the contrastive analysis of textual cohesion and coherence is significant in that it may help bilingual workers as well as learners of L2 to come to a better understanding of he differences between L1 and L2 in respect of their textual organization and thereby develop textual skills to produce more idiomatic texts in L2.

As for our L2 learners, what we should pay attention to is to keep text coherent in the preference of the language we employed, although we have our own preference. Otherwise, what we written or spoken will be regarded as awkward or inappropriate.

We will discuss pragmatic contrastive analysis in chapter seven. As pragmatic contrastive analysis has two dimensions, this chapter also divided into two parts: analysis of speech acts and analysis of conversational interaction.

In the first part, the book introduced us three kinds of speech acts and five basic types of illocutionary acts. Then we know what felicity conditions are, the criteria to see whether the speech acts are successful. Here are some examples listed in the book: the preparatory conditions have to be right, the speech act has to be executed in the correct manner, and the sincerity conditions have to be present.

In the second part, the book introduced the structure and some laws of conversation and the differences exist between conversations in different languages. It is obvious that every conversation has three parts: Openings, Maintaining Conversation, and closings. The two principles employed in conversation we should pay some attention—principle of cooperation and rules of politeness.

The contrastive analysis of is indispensible to the command of L2, so some materials aimed at developing the learners` communicative competence should be added in teaching program.

Ⅱ.Violation of The Principle of Cooperation.

Grice maintains that the overriding principle in conversation is one he calls the cooperative principle which makes your conversational contribution such as required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted propose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. It includes four conversational maxims, i.e. quantity, quality, relation and manner. However, not all conversations follow the four maxims of the principle of cooperation. This phenomenon occurred in both English and Chinese, and sometimes has humorous effects. In the following paragraphs, I will elaborate these violations from four maxims respectively.

2.1 Quantity

Quantity principle means the speakers should provide the very mount of information, neither less nor more, or ambigution will happened. The following are two examples.

E.g. “…89岁的人啊, 就是满嘴的牙掉了,还剩一个牙。可是吃东西呢, 还塞牙了。

于: 剩一个牙还塞牙了?

郭: 他吃藕套眼里了!”

( 郭德纲于谦刚刚好)

In this conversation, Mr.Guo divided his words into two parts to let the audiences know that the old man only has one tooth. The audience will suspect why something plugged into the only teeth. After Mr.Guo`s explanation, the audiences known that not something plugged into the only tooth, but the old man plugged his tooth into lotus root.

He did not have any implementation after “saiya”, so when the audiences knew the fact, they surly burst into great laugh.

2.2 Quality

Quality principle requires that the information presented in the conversation should be true. However, false information may cause humorous effects sometimes.

E.g “Customer: Waiter, my lobster is without a claw. How is that?

Waiter: Well, sir, they are so fresh that they fight with each other in the kitchen.

Customer: Take this one way, and bring me one of the winners.”

In this conversation, the waiter tells a lie to satisfy the customer and tries to solve the problem in this way. In return, the customer also tells a lie. This kind of false information makes the conversation rather interesting.

2.3 Relation

Relative principle requires speakers should talk about the topic, not something has none relations with the topic. If he/they did, then will creat humorous effects.

E.g. “郭: 我的愿望啊, 我自己训练, 我要成为一个游泳健将, 我天天练, 自学成才。

于: 哦,自己练。

郭: 没有不会的，各种姿势全都会，练的正好呢，受到了园林部门的阻挠。

于: 游泳和园林部门挨着吗?

郭: 我跟门口草地上练。

于: 干挠啊。”

( 郭德纲、于谦《我这一辈子》)

In this conversation, Mr. Guo said he practices swimming everyday. In this topic, the audiences would associate the topic with swimming pool naturally,

then Mr.Guo said he practiced around the gate of the botanical garden department. This information has no relationship with the topic, so it makes the conversation absurd and humorous.

2.4 Manner

Manner principle requires the content involved in the conversation should be concise and clear to make the conversation smooth. Sometimes, violation of this principle will not only convey information but also has humorous effects.

E.g. “A fr iend and her young son, Reid, were browsing in a large book store. Engrossed in making a selection, my friend had lost sight of her child. “Reid!”she called out, “Reid!” Just as she spotted the boy, she bumped into another customer. “Pardon me, M a`am,”he said, …but most folks come here because they already like to read. No sense in wasting your time trying to convince them.?”

In this conversation, “Reid” and “read” pronounced similarly, the customer bumped by the mother said in this way makes the mother feel no longer embarrassed, at the same time, this story become rather interesting.

The above examples elaborated phenomenon in the violations of the principle of cooperation. The principle of cooperation is the basis of human conversation communication, which will also make language diverse and promote the communication between human beings.