GRAMMATICAL SYSTEMS ACROSS LANGUAGES: A STUDY OF PARTICIPATION IN ENGLISH, GERMAN AND SPANISH.
Item
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Title
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GRAMMATICAL SYSTEMS ACROSS LANGUAGES: A STUDY OF PARTICIPATION IN ENGLISH, GERMAN AND SPANISH.
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Identifier
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AAI8023716
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identifier
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8023716
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Creator
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LATTEY, ELSA MARIA.
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Contributor
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Erica Garcia
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Date
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1980
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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This comparative/contrastive analysis in the Form-Content (F/C) framework is based on hypothesized signals and meanings of the grammars of English, German and Spanish that constitute Systems of Participation (SPts). In a semantic theory based on a communicative orientation and on the role of the human factor in language use, a cross-language comparison must start from the undeniable fact that bilinguals know when two linguistic expressions are translations of each other--translation is the given. The goal is to go beyond mere description to determine why message X expressed in language A by the signals and meanings available in A corresponds to message X' expressed in language B by the signals and meanings available in B.;From the quantitative study of differences in form and communicative strategies involving the same meanings an important point emerges: the form of a signal is crucial and has been unjustly overlooked in the focus on the primacy of system.;The hypothesis investigated--that quantitatively recognizable differences among languages in the distribution of specific forms equatable on the basis of their meanings reflect biases in production understandable in the light of the grammatical systems available--is based on the assumption, central to F/C and derived from the human factor, that statistical tendencies are explained by the grammar.;Form, scope and implementation are factors seen to contribute to the systemic signal differences and to differences in relative ease of communication. Uniform distinctions, explainable in terms of these factors, are found between Spanish and the other languages, Spanish inclining to express participants more than the others. Quantitative differences in novels and translations are corroborated by data from native-speaker narratives and agree with expectations that take inferential expertise into account. The relative exploitation of the SPts for German vs. English is not as clear, but form seems to operate against English when it comes to expressing three participants at a time and scope seems to work against German when it comes to expressing individual participants.;The translation data reveal that a hierarchy of participant propensity, established by ranking source-language text percentages, shows a direct relationship with the distribution of forms in the target-language texts, specific facts of participant loss or gain being relatable to the SPts and pointing to a cognitive view of events apparently shared by these languages and understandable in terms of the scalar SPt meanings.;Frequencies of non-finites (Spanish and English favor, German disfavors them) are also explainable in SPt terms: Spanish speakers use their inferential expertise to identify the obvious high participant; English speakers reduce the complexity of their word-order signal by omitting the (obvious) high participant.;German and English speakers share a communicative strategy: they warn the hearer/reader of a difficult inference when low participation in the message and pronominal reference (which implies a certain prominence in the discourse) coincide in a single form. German speakers express the low participant pronoun in a linear order before the mid participant. English speakers (who cannot use such reordering means without destroying the word-order signal) tend to prepositional phases or non-mention of a participant.;An interaction of grammatical facts, discourse considerations and communicative strategies in the several aspects investigated is found to reflect the role of the factors characterizing the SPt. Where the grammatical system places restrictions on the language user--in distribution or perception--he finds alternative ways of reaching the communicative goal, developing language-specific strategies of inference and communication.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
