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This study identifies the language learning strategies associated with the achievement of higher levels o f oral proficiency in German for one hundred Irish third level students. It is one of the first studies of this kind to be conducted in Ireland and one of the very few, if any, conducted on third level learners of German. Furthermore, as well as identifying the strategies associated with higher levels of proficiency, the study also investigates how these strategies are used by learners displaying higher and lower levels of proficiency. It then explores the question of how the strategies associated with higher levels of proficiency contribute to the process of proficiency development, and how students perceive them as contributing to this process. Finally, the relationships between learner specific characteristics, strategic behaviour and proficiency levels are assessed. The experimental design combines a quantitative survey with in-depth interviews. The results indicate that orally more proficient students use more strategies more frequently. In particular, they use more cognitive, metacognitive and social strategies. Furthermore, they have a repertoire of approximately ten key strategies which they employ in a structured, purposeful manner and apply to a range of language learning situations. They are convinced that these strategies contribute to the development of proficiency, a view which is borne out by the quantitative findings. Finally, higher levels of motivation and more positive perceptions of personal proficiency levels are strongly associated with higher levels of both strategic behaviour and oral proficiency. These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications. Firstly, they demonstrate the importance of expanding the research framework in studies of this kind beyond the mere identification of the strategies associated with higher proficiency levels. Instead, as in this study, future research should incorporate questions relating to the process of strategy implementation by more and less successful learners and to relationships between the use of particular strategies and the process of foreign language acquisition. Secondly, the findings contribute to our understanding of the strategic behaviour of the orally more proficient student, and in particular the orally more proficient learner of German in an Irish third level context. This understanding relates primarily to the strategies these learners use, the way in which they use them and their attitudes towards their use. Such an understanding forms the basis of successful strategies based instruction in the language classroom.
In literary translation 'correctness' is rarely ratified by linguistic rules; it is more often a question of what a sensitive translator feels to be correct. Intuition will therefore play a major part. This intuition is seen here neither as instinctive reaction prompted by experience, nor as native competence, but as an inquiring, self-moderating influence inspired by the language itself. It is treated in this respect as an informed intuition, that is, as having a linguistic base for sensitive judgement. This assumes that the literary translator is both a creative writer and his own critical reader as well as a fine judge of language potential. This line is applied to translating meaning and sense, transferring the very language, imitating the form and style, re-creating the features, and above all, to capturing those unique qualities of the original. After dealing with word-accuracy, the question of literary input demanded by form and style is examined. The treatment of language used for effect features in a section on Kafka. The merits and the problems of translating dialect as dialect for its own sake are looked at closely and in a positive way as are the possibilities of reproducing 'oddities' of language. The immense task of translating the language of Joyce ('Ulysses ') with all its vagaries and skilful manipulation of words is examined for the possibility of providing an accurate copy. The ultimate test of reproducing a uniqueness of artistic creation together with the profound thought which inspired it, is reserved for a section on Hopkins. While it is recognized that, owing to the constrictions imposed by the extreme and sensitive use of language, no translation can fully include all that there is in his poems, it might be possible to capture enough of their essence to give an impression of a 'German' Hopkins at work. A major objective throughout is the establishment of a linguistic base for the part played by intuition in literary translation.
The bulk of this dissertation is an analysis of grammatical relations (including syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic relations) in Modern Mandarin Chinese. In Chapter I the background, functional framework, and concepts used in the dissertation are introduced. In Chapter II it is shown that Chinese has not grammaticalized the syntactic functions 'subject' and 'object', and has no syntactic function-changing passive construction. In Chapter III the nature of word order and its relationship to information structure in Chinese is examined. It is argued that word order in Chinese does not mark 'definite' and 'indefinite' NPs, as is commonly assumed, but marks information structure. A number of marked focus structure constructions are also discussed. In Chapter IV the discussion is of the structure of Chinese discourse, developed from an analysis of the nature of discourse referent tracking. It is shown that recovery of anaphora is not based on syntactic functions, but is based on real world knowledge (semantics and pragmatics) and discourse structure. Chapter V gives the conclusions, followed by a discussion of some of the diachronic considerations that arose in the course of this investigation. It is suggested that within Sino-Tibetan, Chinese should be seen as an innovator in terms of word order, and that grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan should be seen to be pragmatically based rather than syntactically based.