Contrastive Analysis

A Contrastive Analysis of Connector Usage in French and Spanish Monolingual Corpora

English for Academic Purposes

Professor: Fanny Meunier
Assistant: Damien Littré















2011-2012







Table of contents



Introduction



I. Theoretical part

1. Contrastive analyses
2. Connectors
3. Corpus-based studies




II. Practical Part1. Corpora
2. Application




Conclusion

















Because of some problems with our former MA dissertation topic, we recently defined another one with our directors. Here are the results of our first research on this new project.




Introduction

We are currently working on a contrastive analysis of the most frequent French and Spanishconnectors. Our study, following the advice given by Granger and Tyson (1996: 17) in their article on the analysis of connector usage of native and non-native speakers of English, will set out to compare some connectors considering their meaning, syntax, as well as their stylistic value. In their article, Granger and Tyson (1996: 17) argue that: “learners should not be presented with lists ofinterchangeable connectors but instead taught the semantic, stylistic and syntactic behavior of individual connectors, using authentic texts” in order to avoid misuses. Besides, Granger and Tyson are not the only ones highlighting the advantages of a deeper analysis of individual connectors: Tricás (1990) also praises such an approach. Tricás (1990: 529) is convinced that one should not only study thesyntax or semantic of connectors, but also their argumentative nuances, which would allow much more precise translations.

More than following Granger and Tyson for the methodology of our study, we will also agree with them as for the necessity of using authentic texts. Since the availability of textual corpora made up of productions of French learners of Spanish is very limited, we willconcentrate on native monolingual corpora in order to highlight discrepancies in the use of connectors presented as interchangeable in unilingual and bilingual dictionaries. Nevertheless, we are not only hoping to find differences in the usage, we also hypothesize a higher frequency and range of connectors in French than in Spanish. Vinay and Darbelnet (1977: 222, quoted in Granger and Tyson 1996: 19)claim that : “Le français […] affectionne les articulations et se passe difficilement des précisions qu’elles peuvent apporter dans le déroulement de la pensée ». We will need to further investigate those hypotheses by analyzing the contrastive literature on French/Spanish and by exploiting our corpora.







I. Theoretical part

1. Contrastive analyses

The adjective“contrastive” has been used to form various collocations corresponding to different areas of study: Applied Contrastive Language Studies, Contrastive Linguistics, Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis or Contrastive Discourse Analysis, are some of them (Gómez-González and Doval-Suárez 2005: 19). In those contexts, the term “contrastive” is mostly used to refer to interlinguistic and interculturalcomparisons of data across different languages (Gómez-González and Doval-Suárez 2005: 19).

Fisiak (1990: 5) suggests a classification of those fields of research: he distinguishes between contrastive analysis for its own sake, i.e. only stating differences and similarities between the languages under study (theoretical contrastive analysis), and contrastive analysis collecting thosedifferences and similarities for specific purposes such as teaching, translation or lexicography, i.e. in order to give an application to the findings (applied contrastive analysis). Since the final aim of our MA dissertation is to point out essential information helping French learners of Spanish master the use of the most frequent Spanish connectors, our study is part of applied contrastive analyses....