Seite 27 [27]
Chapter 2
CROSS-LINGUISTIC INELUENCES
——o—
2.1 DEVELOPMENTS IN LINGUISTICS
Structural linguistics, the prevailing paradigm at the time of the rise of CL
was focused on sentence structure. It was superseded by transformational
generative grammar, proposed by Chomsky in 1957. However, the centrality
of syntax remained, and this limited the scope of linguistic theory to linguis¬
tic competence, sealing it off from the influences of use and context. Transfor¬
mational generative grammar is characterized by a high degree of abstraction
and idealization.
Around 1970, new linguistic disciplines emerged, which began to pay at¬
tention to performance, the actual use of language in context for communica¬
tion. Sociolinguistics rejected Chomsky’s abstraction of the ‘ideal native
speaker/hearer’; instead, it directed its attention to varieties of language. Text
linguistics and discourse analysis rejected the limitation of linguistics to sen¬
tence grammar, and pragmatics has given attention to meaning in use, rather
than meaning in the abstract (Leech 1983).
Sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics have proved to be more
useful for applied linguistics, inclusive of language teaching and translator
training. This is shown in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
Theoretical linguistics Applied linguistics
focused on system => phonology and | focused on use in context > discourse,
syntax; sentence level pragmatic features and language variet¬
les
2.2 FROM CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
TO Cross-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES (CLI)
Intuitively it is very attractive to attribute errors to interlingual differences.
Hungarian learners, e.g., have been observed to add an unnecessary extra ele¬
ment to compounds in English, or use compounds directly translated from
Hungarian:
9 25 e