 | | |
| TRAD0096-1 | Comparative method in linguistics, English-French
|
|
| Duration : | 30h Th |
|
| Number of credits : |
|
|
| Lecturer : | Lieselotte Brems |
|
Language(s) of instruction :
|
| French language |
|
Course contents :
|
|
- Following an in-depth, contrastive discussion of the noun and/or verb phrase in English and French, we will move on to selected case studies of (bi)nominal and/or verbal structures in both languages that allow for comparison, e.g. size noun expressions (bunch/load(s)/lot(s)/heap(s) of vs. un tas/fatras de, une flopée/masse/foule de); type nouns (sort/kind/type of vs. sorte/type/genre/espèce de); descriptive, subjective and prefix uses of adjectives (e.g. an old man 'un vieil homme', an old hand 'un vieux routier', old chap 'ma vieille branche', old boy/girl 'ancien-élève'); new verbs of communication (e.g. French skyper, mailer, texter, blackberriser vs. their English counterparts cf. Verroens et al. 2010), etc.
- Students will then work on their own contrastive topic (under supervision of the lecturer) by means of corpus data from monolingual corpora (e.g. the English Collins Wordbanks corpus and French Frantext) and/or parallel multilingual corpora from different registers/genres (e.g. subtitles.org, OPUS, BAF corpus, Mulinco), or using the Web as corpus.
|
|
Learning outcomes of the course :
|
|
- The students gain insight into corpus-based contrastive analysis by means of in-depth case studies of specific constructions which in present-day English and French display variation and may pose challenges to translators.
- The insight obtained from this course is twofold and serves to answer the following interlocking questions:
- Do similar-looking expressions/structures function (partially) analogously in French and English? In which ways do they differ in usage and why so, given for instance the typological differences between these languages (e.g. structure of prenominal slots in the NP; word order and periphrasis)
- How are expressions, for which structural 'cognates' exist, translated between English and French in specific genres or registers? (e.g. It was a sort of robot vs. C'était une sorte/genre de robot or It was like a robot?; I will text you every day vs. Je te texterai tous les jours or Je t'enverrai des sms tous les jours?). How do translated and non-translated varieties of English/French differ?
|
|
Prerequisites and co-requisites/ Recommended optional programme components :
|
| Good knowledge of English and French |
|
Planned learning activities and teaching methods :
|
| The course combines theoretical sessions with hands-on exercises on the basis of various kinds of corpus data, which yield insight into different aspects of contrastive analysis. In addition, students will be supervised as they work on their own paper, in which they have to demonstrate that they have mastered the theoretical-descriptive framework dealt with in class by applying it to new data. |
|
Mode of delivery (face-to-face ; distance-learning) :
|
| See : http://cipl82.philo.ulg.ac.be/horaires |
|
Recommended or required readings :
|
| Handouts and powerpoint presentations (which will be made available on-line) as well as a reader with selected articles, e.g. Fleischman, S. 1999. "Pragmatic markers in comparative perspective: A contribution to cross-linguistic pragmatics. paper presented at PRAGMA 99 -- Van Goethem, K. 2008. "Oud-leerling versus ancien élève: A Comparative Study of Adjectives Grammaticalizing into Prefixes in Dutch and French. Morphology 18: 27-49. -- Verroens, F., B. De Clerck & D. Willems. 2010. "I blackberried him twice and skyped him a happy Father's day: A propos des (nouveaux) verbes de Communication. Une étude contrastive français - anglais basée sur corpus". Lingvisticæ Investigationes 33 (2): 285-306 |
|
Assessment methods and criteria :
|
| paper (under supervision of the lecturer) and oral discussion of this paper |
|
Organizational remarks :
|
| this course is taught in English |
|
Contacts :
|
| Lieselotte Brems, chargée de cours
lieselotte.brems@arts.kuleuven.be
Département de Langues et littératures modernes
3, Place Cockerill, 6th floor |
|
