Page 27 [27]
OCR
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 It was superseded by transformational generative grammar, proposed by Chomsky in 1957.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 linguistic competence, sealing it off from the influences of use and context. Transformational generative grammar is characterized by a high degree of abstraction and idealization. Around 1970, new linguistic disciplines emerged, which began to pay attention to performance, the actual use of language in context for communication. 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 sentence 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 varietles 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 element to compounds in English, or use compounds directly translated from Hungarian: 9 25 e
