Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives
Abstract
This book examines the contribution of various recent developments in linguistics to contrastive analysis. The articles range across a broad gamut of languages, with most attention going to the languages of Europe. They show how advances in theory and computer technology are together impacting the field of contrastive linguistics. Part I focuses, from a broadly functional-cognitive viewpoint, on the close link with typology, stressing the importance of embedding the treatment of grammatical categories in their contexts of use. Part II turns to methodological issues, exploring the enormous potential offered by parallel, computer-accessible corpora to contrastive linguistics and to enhancing the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy of cross-linguistic studies. Part III is concerned with contrastive semantics, ranging from individual items to entire grammatical constructions, and shows how meanings are coupled to language-specific cognitive strategies and even to cultural differences in subjective awareness and the fashioning of personal identity.
This article outlines the beginnings of corpus-based contrastive studies with special reference to the development of parallel corpora that took place in Scandinavia in the early 1990s under the direction of Stig Johansson. It then discusses multilingual corpus types and methodological issues of their exploration, including the tertium comparationis for contrastive studies based on different types of corpora. Some glimpses are offered of recent developments and current trends in the field, including the widening scope of corpus-based contrastive analysis, concerning language pairs as well as the kinds of topics studied and the methods used. The paper ends by identifying and discussing some challenges for the field and indicating prospects and directions for its future.
Language is a complex phenomenon of multiforms, for it is associated in many fields; sometimes it is acoustic, sometimes physiological and sometimes psychological and social (De Saussure 2002, p. 15).
This article focuses on two Finnish personal constructions which can be used to create indexically open reference, i.e. they can be used to refer to generalized or shared human experiences. These two constructions are the zero-person construction and the open 2nd person singular construction. Using Finnish everyday conversational data, we (i) statistically analyze the distributional semantico-grammatical differences in the use of the zero-person and open 2nd person singular constructions, and (ii) examine these differences on a clausal and sequential level in interactional contexts. In our analysis, we integrate quantitative and qualitative methods. Our aim is to show that by mixing methods it is possible to both reveal the recurring semantico-grammatical patterns of the constructions across a large corpus and analyze how these patterns are shaped by the ongoing interaction.
This dissertation is a contrastive analysis of person deixis in English and Japanese. Person deixis is the linguistic reference to discourse participant roles, i.e. expressions referring to the speaker, listener and to other persons, who may or may not be present in the discourse situation. Person deixis may be manifested linguistically in various ways across languages. In English, it is grammaticalized through the pronominal system and verbal agreement inflection. In Japanese, in contrast, person deixis is primarily lexically manifested in the form of “person nouns”, whose meanings vary according to different social variables. More importantly, Japanese allows for widespread nominal ellipsis, so that such person nouns are frequently left unexpressed in real discourse. These features lead to the hypothesis that person deixis is less grammaticalized in Japanese than in English.
The study has a functional linguistic orientation, and uses Andrew Chesterman´s methodology from 1998, which allows for a hypothesisdriven, step-by-step contrastive analysis of a designated linguistic domain. The theoretical part of the dissertation includes discussions on the definition of pronouns and of deictic studies as belonging simultaneously to the fields of semantics and pragmatics.
By using a combination of intuitive data and two corpora of translated texts, I search for grammatical devices in Japanese that compensate for the low degree of grammaticalization of person deixis. The devices that are explored in Japanese are honorifics, benefactives, and the interaction between psych predicates and evidentials. Through a careful analysis of these forms, I argue that they all manifest a different, understudied type of deixis: empathetic deixis. The defining feature of empathetic deixis is not first, second and third person, but rather psychologically proximal versus distal: persons with whom the speaker identifies more or less closely. This finding has led to a revised typological hypothesis that Japanese is an empathy-prominent language, while English is a personprominent language.
A number of recent studies point to the bene ts of critical incidents and re ective writing in the language instruction process. Within this context, this study purports to unveil the role that critical incidents and re ective writing play in the con guration of future EFL teachers’ professional identities. To this end, 30 senior college students enrolled in an English Teaching Major wrote and re ected on critical incidents that have shaped their language learning and teaching of English experiences. Once data had been gathered, the researchers followed Freeman’s (1998) four-stage process for data analysis and interpretation. Findings were later on theorized in light of the research goal and the theory discussed in the theoretical framework. Conclusions are that (1) spaces for re ection should be opened so that positive practices are kept and the negative can be dismantled, (2) re ective writing through critical incidents is an effective way to realize professional and other social identities, and (3) re ective writing through critical incidents is a bridge through which dialogue can be initiated amongst all educational actors. The study vindicates the use of narrative inquiry as a way to explore learner’s affective domain and to understand educational phenomena as embedded within a speci c socio-cultural context.
Estudios recientes resaltan la relación entre los incidentes críticos, la escritura re exiva y el aprendizaje de lenguas. Dentro de este contexto, este estudio busca desvelar el papel de los incidentes críticos y la escritura re exiva en la con guración de la identidad profesional de futuros docentes de inglés como lengua extranjera (EFL). Para tal cometido, 30 estudiantes universitarios de cuarto año de una carrera de enseñanza del inglés escribieron y re exionaron sobre incidentes críticos que han forjado sus experiencias de aprendizaje y enseñanza del inglés. Recolectados los datos, los investigadores siguieron el proceso de cuatro etapas para el análisis e interpretación de resultados propuesto por Freeman (1998). Posteriormente, teorizaron sobre los hallazgos a la luz del objetivo de investigación, así como de lo discutido en el marco teórico. Se concluye que (1) se deben abrir espacios de re exión que ayuden a preservar las prácticas docentes positivas y a desechar las negativas; (2) la escritura re exiva mediante incidentes críticos constituye un método e caz para comprender identidades profesionales, así como otras de tipo social; y (3) la escritura re exiva mediante incidentes críticos sirve como medio de diálogo entre los distintos actores del proceso educativo. El estudio vindica el uso de la investigación narrativa biográ ca como método para indagar en el dominio afectivo de los estudiantes, a la vez que llama a comprender todo fenómeno educativo dentro de un marco sociocultural determinado.
In this article, we present methodological problems pertaining to the exploitation of parallel corpora, i.e. corpora composed of translations and their respective originals, and we try to propose the principles and rules helping to avoid said problems. We treat successively factors of the size and composition of parallel corpora (section 2), technical factors such as alignment or bilingual POS-tagging (section 3), the tricky question of the equivalence of the parallel versions (4.1), the importance of metadata about the originals as well as the translations (4.2) and the particularities of the language of translation (4.3). The methodological principles are illustrated by specific studies on the parallel corpus InterCorp.
Contrastive Linguistics, like other linguistic disciplines, is becoming more and more data-oriented, relying increasingly on the statistical analysis of corpus data to reveal and investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between languages. The volume Corpus Studies in Contrastive Linguistics illustrates this current trend with a representative sample of contrastive linguistic case studies. These cover a range of linguistic phenomena (syntax, modality and discourse) and pursue different types of research questions (grammaticalization, pragmatic function, stylistic function, typological profile). Accordingly, they use different types of corpora: contemporary and historical texts, written and spoken discourse, and various text types, such as academic discourse and political discourse. Five different languages are represented (English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Lithuanian) with English as a language of comparison in each contribution. The studies all show that quantitative analyses are not at odds with insightful qualitative interpretations or functional approaches to language, but rather complement each other. This volume was orginally published as a special issue of International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15:2 (2010).
This book reports on the contrastive-semantic investigation of sadness expressions between English and Chinese, based on two monolingual general corpora and a parallel corpus. The exploration adopts a unique theoretical approach which integrates corpus-linguistic theories on meaning (as a social construct, usage and paraphrase) with a corpus-linguistic lexical model. It employs a new complex but workable methodology which combines computational tools with manual examination to tease meaning out of corpus evidence, to compare and contrast lexical items that do not match up neatly between languages. It looks at sadness expressions both within and across languages in terms of three corpus-linguistic structural categories, i.e. colligation, collocation and semantic association/preference, and paraphrase (both explicit and implicit) to capture their subtle nuances of meaning, disclose the culture-specific conceptualisations encoded in them, and highlight their respective cultural distinctiveness of emotion. By presenting multidisciplinary original work, Sadness Expressions in English and Chinese will be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics, contrastive lexical semantics, psychology, bilingual lexicography and language pedagogy. <http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sadness-expressions-in-english-and-chinese-9781474274081/>
Aijmer Karin &Altenberg Bengt (eds.), Advances in corpus-based contrastive linguistics (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 54). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. Pp. x + 295. - Volume 51 Issue 3 - Siqi Lyu, Yi-na Wang
In his much-cited work Linguistics Across Cultures Lado (1957/1971) gives advice on how to compare linguistic and cultural systems, mainly with the aim of improving language teaching.
Keywords:
contrastive analysis;
corpus;
crosslinguistic studies;
grammar;
tertium comparationis;
translation
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.