ACQUIRING /R/ IN CONTEXT

Colantoni & Steele 2007

1. This article seeks to explain the order of acquisition of a certain target allophonic phoneme based on the Universal Grammar approach. The authors explain English-speaking French language learners’ errors in terms of order of acquisition and the introduction and conclusion imply that this order of acquisition based on complicated principles of aerophonetics might be universal across all learners of all languages.

2. The article addresses property theory because it takes as a basic assumption that in order to generalize findings found for ESL, it is necessary to “expand the empirical base to include an even greater variety of target languages.” The authors hope to deduce universal constraints from this study and others like it.

3. While I believe the authors focused on universal constraints on targetlike production of French rhotics, I was most interested in the finding that just the act of production gives the language learners practice with the target phonemes and helps them move toward more targetlike production. I feel that this indirectly supports Swain’s Output Hypothesis.

aspects of polite behaviour in French and Syrian service encounters: a data-based comparative study

veronique traverso
2006

conversational routine: highly predictable expressions in specific social situations

ritual acts (related to sociology): "conventionalised act through which an individual portrays his respect and regard for some object of ultimate value." (Goffman)

The script in the service encounter:

• opening sequence of the encounter
• sequence including the request
• (payment sequence)
• leave-taking sequence

To what extent are encounters determined by cultural norms? How far away could one stray form those norms?

Syrian: "may it be blessed" can be used in many situations

"In the Syrian corpus, the request is routinized through the use of even fewer formulas, including indirect devices:
'Is there?' 'have you got?'"

"at your service, willingly (lit. 'on my eye,' 'on my eye and on my head')"

clause combining across languages: a corpus-based study of english-french translation shifts

christelle cosme.

This study uses bilingual corpora to test “the claim that English shows a strong preference for coordination while French makes more extensive use of subordination” (71). The results support this claim.
This article has two primary goals: “(a) gain more insight into the contrast between English and French in terms of clause-combining; (b) shed more light on clause combining in general – and, more particularly, on the relationship between coordination and subordination” (72). The article also has two secondary goals: (a) demonstrate how “corpus linguistics can serve the needs of syntactic cross-linguistic research” and (b) encourage language teachers to introduce translation corpora as a teaching tool (95-99).

Syntactical Background Information
There are three types of interclausal relations (73-74).
Juxtaposition He ate too much for dinner; he was ill the next day. Parataxis: establishes equivalent relation between clauses
Coordination He ate too much for dinner and (he) was ill the next day. Parataxis
Subordination Because he ate too much for dinner, he was ill the next day. Hypotaxis: establishes hierarchical relation between clauses

“No clear borderline seems to exist between coordination and subordination.”
The claim is that English prefers coordination, while French prefers subordination (76, example 8).

Methodology

Cosme used both monolingual and translation corpora for this study, analyzing two registers: fiction and journalese (78-79).


Monolingual corpus results

“Interclausal and is significantly more frequent than interclausal et” in fiction; this difference is not observed in journalese (80-81).

French is more apt to coordinate full clauses than English, which is more likely to coordinate predicates by ellipting the subject in the second clause (82).

Coordinating conjunctions convey two separate meanings: the static meaning (pure addition) or dynamic meaning (temporal sequence or consequence). In journalese, French tends to use et to convey a static meaning more often than English, which tends to use and to convey a dynamic meaning (83-84).


Translation corpus results

“It is more common for inter-clausal and to be translated by something else other than inter-clausal et ( . . .) than vice-versa” (84). This occurs in both fiction and journalese (85).

In the majority of examples, translators have the option of either coordinating or subordinating: the change is not obligatory (86).

Translations from English to French shift to subordinating structures by use of the following:
• Participle clause (28.3%)
• Purpose clause
• Relative clause (23.9%)
French-to-English translations display the following shift strategies:
• Participle clause (41.2%)

Are Emotions UNiversal or Culture-Specific?

Anna Wierzbicka

"According to Izard and Buechler (1980:168), the fundamental emotions are 1. interest 2 joy 3 surprise 4 sadness 5 anger 6 disgust 7 contempt 8 fear 9 shame/shyness and 10 guilt."

"English terms of emotion constitute a folk taxonomy, not an objective, culture-free analytical framework, so obviously we cannot assume that English words such as disgust, fear, or shame are clues to universal human concepts or to basic psychological realities. Yet words such as these are usually treated as if they were objective, culture-free 'natural kinds'."

Polish words tesknota and teskknic:

"X teskni do Y -->

X thinks something like this:
I am far away from Y
when I was with Y I felt something good
I want to be with Y now
if I were with Y now I would feel something good
I cannot be with Y now
because of this, X feels something bad.
"Several English words may come to mind as potential translation equivalents of the Polish word (homesick, long, miss, pine, nostalgia) but they all differ from another and from the Polish term as well."

"Both everyday speech and psychologically sensitive literature are full of attempts, often highly successful, to convey feelings for which there is no simple word."

"What is really important, I think, is that the feelings of lek and of tesknota are not sufficently salient in our American culture to have merited lexicalization...lexical differences between lek and guilt, or between tesknic and miss, may not only reflect but also encourage different, culture-specific, modes of hinking and feeling.
Are there any emotion concepts which have been lexically recognized as distinct and identifiable in all languages of the world?
The evidence available suggests that there are no such emotions."

Comparison of the English disgust and the French degout:

Izard (1969) reports that French and American children show very similar patterns of growth of recognition of individual emotions with age. He notes, however, that with respect to disgust there is an unexpected difference: the French slightly exceed the Americans at most age levels. Izard tries to explain this puzzling fact in terms of greater emphasis placed on the culinary art in French culture:"

"...the English word disgust encodes a feeling caused by 'bad and ugly' human actions (or their results), not by food as such. This is not to deny that the English concept 'disgust' contains a reference to 'something like bad taste and an impulse to get something out of one's mouth', but in 'disgust' this reference serves only as a simile."

"From an ENglish speaker's point of view, shame and fear are two different emotions. But form the point of view of speakers of Gidjingali, apparentky they are not, because both are seen in terms of the same impulse to retreat."

"Many languages of the world (for example, Korean, Ewe in West Africa, and JKuman in Papua) don't lexically distinguish shame and embarrassment. In fact, the same word also seems to be applied to situations in which English would use the word shy rather than either embarrassed or ashamed."

"...some tests showed that pre-literate subjects in New Guinea failed to distinguish between fear and surprise."

English faux amis for francophones learning english

robert sheen
http://www.volterre-fr.com/sheen.html
retrieved January 19, 2009
Volterre-Fr, English and French Language Resources

There are "tens of hundreds" of faux amis. Venn diagrams can be useful in teaching francophones about faux amis. Absolute faux amis are represented by two circles which do not overlap; partial faux amis can be represented by a smaller circle inside a larger one, or by overlapping circles.

Word-Studies in French and English

T. Atkinson Jenkins

Language, vol. 9, no. 4, dec. 1933, p.5-7+9-94

The origin of the word cuckold comes from the cuckoo. Besides laying her eggs in another bird's nest, the female cuckoo will mate with other males besides her primary mate; the male generally reacts passively. This is the reason for the folk derivation of the word cuckold.

From Latin to Anglo-French and Middle English: The Role of the Multilingual Gloss

W. Rothwell
The Modern Language Review vol. 88 no 3 (July 1993) pp. 581-599

The original Latin words did not morph directly into French; each Latinate word changed meaning slightly as it entered the French lexicon. "This complicated semantic pattern is the result of social, not phonological factors . . . (583)".Medieval glosses might provide more accurate definitions than literary works, although glosses have been ignored by scholars.

Thirteenth century Anglo-French glosses attest that the English "enter" came from the French "entrer," but with the added meaning of to enter into a book.

French is not simply "the Latin spoken in Gaul."