HA NOI METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS REFLECTIONS Instructor: Dr Nguyen Thi Van Anh Student: Hoang Thi Thanh Ha NNA D2020C Hanoi, November 2022 220000584 CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS Chapter 1: Some generalities of Contrastive Linguistics In chapter 1 we have learned last week, we have been introduced about a lot of aspects of Contrastive Analysis. There are 7 parts: - Introduction What is contrastive analysis? The psychological basis of CA The linguistics opponents of CA Microlinguistic and macrolinguistic CA Some basic procedures commonly used in CA Summary Contrastive Analysis refer to the contrastive purpose. According to Carl James, contrastive linguistic is both generalist and particularist, somewhere intermediate on a scale between the two extremes, and this is different from comparative linguistic. Next is the third part of chapter 1, the psychological basis of CA. In 1980, James stated clearly that CA is a hybrid drawing on the science of linguistic and phonology. Moreover, linguistic is concerned with the formal properties of language and not directly with learning, which is a psychological matter and since the contrastive analysis is concerned with foreign language learning, it clearly needs a psychological component. Transfer in crucial and one word can have vary meaning and when we transfer something from Vietnamese to English, we need to consider a lot of aspects of the word: grammar, intonation, structure (the deep and the surface structure), etc. The study of contrastive analysis follows four procedures: Description, Selection, Comparison and Prediction. To summarize, in this chapter we have discover some generalities of contrastive linguistic and the definition of the contrastive analysis. I would like to talk more about the differences between Comparative linguistic and Contrastive linguistic. To begin with, I will start with The Comparative linguistic. The comparative linguistic make a diachronic study with a view to reconstructing form in their lost parent languages or to classify language into families. The subjects of comparison are limited to its parent languages and the languages compared are not limited. Also, it is intended to penetrate and to make clear the laws of the historical development and it shows the similarities and differences among languages compared. In contrast, Contrastive linguistic makes a synchronic study, it aims at the heterogeneity of the languages compared, the subject of it may be its parent or not parent languages. It provides a practical use in language teaching, translation, etc. and focus on differences rather than similarities. CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS Chapter 2: The Psychological Basis of Contrastive Analysis In the chapter 1, I have studied about the definition of CA and in this chapter 2, I had a chance to explore more about Contrastive Analysis, specially the Transfer. One of the concerns of learning psychologists is the effects of one learning tasks on a subsequent one. The observation that prior learning effects subsequent learning leads to the hypothesis of transfer. Ellis (1965) has referred that perhaps the single most important concept in the theory and practice of education. And he also supplied that the hypothesis that the learning of task A will affect the subsequent learning of task B and it becomes obvious the psychological foundation of CA is transfer theory. As far as I have searched, learning involves the association of 2 entities: a stimulus (S) and a response (R) and the psychological basis of CA resides in the two psychological enterprises which are Associationism and S-R theory. We have some problems of definition. The first problem is the conditioning of certain response. This problem is that their association with certain stimuli, the responses are assumed to be available to learner. And the second problem is that CA is more concerned with teaching rather than learning and the difference is the former involves the predetermination and conventionalization of what Ss and Rs are to be associated, whereas the latter does not. Beyond of these 2 problems, we have a further problem is that language behavior is a 2-way process, that means we are not only produce utterances, we also receive them. Moreover, a response in language behavior is the utterance itself, the study of which is the proper concern of linguistic. The third field I have learnt is the Transfer theory and CA. Lado once said “individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings as the distribution of forms and meanings of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture”. In this sector, I have known about 2 more definitions which are Proaction- the effect of a given specifiable prior activity upon the learning of a given test activity, and Retroaction- the effect of a specifiable interpolated activity upon the retention of a previously learned activity. To be continued with, I will mention about the Scale of Difference, there are 3 levels: Maximum Differences of Rs - Partial Similarity of Rs - Greatest Similarity of Ss & Rs. In the last lesson, I have learnt more about 3 versions of CA and the difference between transfer and interference. We have 3 versions: the strong version, the weak version and the moderate version and 2 types of transfer: negative and positive transfer Transfer Interference The influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously This is the negative transfer, also one t=of the main cause of linguistic errors and is it an undesirable phenomenon. CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS Chapter 3: The Linguistic Components of Contrastive Analysis In this chapter, I have been taught about the linguistic components of CA. To begin with, CA owes to linguistics the framework in which the descriptions are orgranized. Framework means three things: - CA adopts the linguistic tactic of dividing up the unwidely concept a language into three smaller areas: the levels of lexicology, grammar and lexis. - Use is made of the descriptive categories of linguistic: unit, structure, class, system - CA utilizes descriptions arrived at under the same model of language. In the Levels of language, we focus on 4 components: phonology, lexis, morphology, syntax. The second repercussion emanating from the observance of levels of description has been the injunction that they should not be mixed. It was a regulation within structural linguistic that the description of, the level of phonology should be carried out without reference to the other linguistic level. In the Grammar categories, CA is therefore concerned with the possibilities of and limitations on, maintaining 1:1 correspondence of units at ranks below that of sentence. Language may differ, not in demanding different structural exponents of identical system or system combination choices, but in offering different ranges of options. Difference is the variable which CA is concerned with. 2 linguists, in total accord about the levels and categories of language description can still produce different analyses of the same language data. The analytic technique developed by the structuralists is known as Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis. A procedure whereby each of the two languages involved the CA has been analysed independently beforehand, after which the 2 resulting analyses are junxtaposed for purposes of comparison. The 2-phase approach is not wholly satisfactory: the descriptive phase seems to be a mere preliminary to CA rather than an integral part of it. For whole the chapter, I have now laid the theoretical bases for CA, in both linguistic field and psychological field but I have still confused a lot in some theories, I would search more in the Internet and try to read the books carefully to full-cover the lesson. CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS Chapter 4: Microlinguistic Contrastive Analysis This chapter focused on the traditional practice on the three levels of Phonology, Grammar and Lexis. The principle when doing CA is that doing CAs of a global and exhaustive nature is neither feasible nor desirable due to the reason is that linguistics is not yet in a position to describe a language “in toto” so there are no pairs of total descriptions for input to CA. Also, its inconceivable that a learner could gain access to is one of the main reason. Executing a CA is concerned with two steps: description and comparison. The minimum requirement of “parallel description” is that the 2 languages be described through the same model of description. There is a problem whether to use one model or different models. On the one hand, there are good theoretical reasons for using the same model for yielding the descriptions of L1 and L2; on the other hand, there are equally cogent practical reasons why this is undesirable. The second step is comparison. There is a number of theoretical problems, mainly surrounding the issue of criteria for comparison, concentration here is on how to compare rather than on what basis to compare. Admittedly, this is a somewhat arbitrary approach, since the 'how' and 'why' are inextricable. We have 4 steps of doing CA: - Assemble data showing important systems of each language, there are several systems in each sentence of the two languages. - Mention the recognitions of each grammatical category of each language relevant to CA - Supplementing the data, it is needed to expand the rules to accommodate the new data. - Formulate the contrast. Phonological CA: Contrastive Phonetics and Phonology Phonetics is concerned with three types of physical reality. Phonology is concerned with the way sounds function in a language, how many of them are used in a language, not the physical reality but the mental reality. For phonological CA, we will talk about the example of contrastive phonetics and phonology There are four steps in a contrastive sound system 1- draw up the phonemic inventory of L1 and L2 2- equate phonemes interlingually 3- list the phonemic variants (allophones) 4- determine the distributional restrictions Contrastive Lexicology There are three areas when contrastive lexicology deal with: 1. culture as a language determinant (relativism) which was neglected. 2. cultural barriers in translation such as religious texts 3. Bilingual lexicography is a concern of CA. The task of contrastive lexicology is to compare linguistic accounts of the lexical competence possessed by speakers of the two languages. CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS Chapter 5: Macrolinguistics and Contrastive Analysis Chapter 4 has presented the traditional view of linguistic and CA. In this chapter, I have learned about the formal system. The formal system of any language which linguistics set out to describe has been called different things by different people: Saussure talked of langue, Chomsky of Competence, while another term is code. To gain access to the code' underlying' a language it is necessary, linguists claim, to disregard much that goes into language. There are 3 ways in which data is idealized in linguistic: Regularisation, Standardisation, and Decontextualisation. ‘Macrolinguistics’ is 'broad' or 'human' linguistics which concerns about the process of communication to understand how people communicate. We have six variables that Hymes has identified: Setting, Participants, Purpose, Key, Content, and Channel. Also, there are three points to mark macrolinguistics. Firstly, we think about communicative competence, not Chomsky’s linguistic competence. Secondly, we describe events having extralinguistic settings. And finally, we search for linguistic organization, not a single sentence. There are two areas of macrolinguistics: ‘text analysis’ and ‘discourse analysis’. The two terms have sometimes been confused. Text analysis concerns linguistic forms and contexts appropriate for them to make intersentential connections, and units bigger than the sentence. There are formal devices which signal the exact nature of the relationships holding between successive sentences. These devices may be grammatical, lexical, or, in speech, intonational. Lexical devices are the relations of synonymy and hyponymy into which lexical items in the various sentences enter. Grammatical devices include four major grammatical means: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, comparison, and parallel structure. Reference may be of two types: exophoric, referring out of the text to an item in the world (look at that); endophoric, referring to textual items. Ellipse works anaphorically by deleting something referred to earlier. Comparison is not invariably located in one sentence, although this is probably the most economical and most explicit way of stating comparison. Functional Sentence Perspective: successive sentences in text must do two things: they must be informative, and, at the same time be relevant. These are my understanding of Macrolinguistic in Contrastive Linguistics, though still many things confused me. But in order to achieve this, I would find out more references and sources to better understand.
