November 10, 2010

Fries (1952) of grammar: grammar consists of the devices of form and arrangement Arrangement = the relative order of elements in constructions Formal devices at grammar level: three kinds:

Morphological markers, eg. ness (eng), -keit (germ); -ezza (it) nost (srb), as in cleanliness, Sauberkeit, or sicurezza, sigurnost; marking them as nouns Function words (articles, prepositions, conjuctions etc) Suprasegments (stress and intonation) : indicate whether the utterance is a statement or a question;

Has visto las rebajas en El Corte Ingls? Videla si rasprodaju u El Corte Ingles? Have you seen the sale at El Corte Ingles?

 To

conduct a contrastive analysis, we check if the languages employ the same devices or not Languages have preferences for the use of some formal devices over others: e.g. Serbian shows preference for morphological markers over syntactic arrangement of forms, unlike English . Serbian is, therefore a dominantly synthetic language.

 The

car runs

El coche corre.

Sent

-> S + P S-> NP NP -> Det + H Det-> Art def .... H-> N

car +N + count + singular + neuter - animate - human

coche +N + count + singular + masculine - animate - human

Syntactically, the two structures E and Sp, are identical: The same constituent structure The number of constituents the same The classes to which the constituents belong the same Functionally, all the elements are identical; However, the contrasts are found at the morphological level as well as on the morphosyntactic interface:

A) Noun in Sp marked for gender , noun in E is not -> Sp has grammatical gender, unlike E B) Art def marked for gender, E is not C) Congruence in gender Artdef: Noun in Sp, not in E Verb: formal marking for 3psg in E, not in Sp

Now, do the same for the following English : Serbian pairs: The car runs : Auto se kree. The car runs fast : Auto juri. Who is there? : Ko je tamo? The little girl broke into tears: Devojica zaplaka. A silence fell between them: Meu njima zavlada tiina.

What conclusions about English and Serbian can you draw from these examples ?

 Fries,

C.C. (1952) The Structure of English. Harcourt Brace. orevi, R. Uvod u kontrastiranje jezika ( 35-39)