Note:

This study aims to discuss the noun and prepositional phrases in English and in Vietnamese and their impact upon teaching and learning English in the Vietnamese situation. Attempts have been made to state the similarities and differences in noun and prepositional phrases in the two languages and raise and solve some difficulties and problems arising particularly from differences between English and Vietnamese. In this study, Contrastive Linguistics is concerned with the comparison of the two languages with a view to determining the differences and similarities between them. With this practical aim the study tries to provide a model for comparison and determine how and which of the phrases are comparable. It is hoped to provide as much information as is possible in a limited study of this kind on English noun and prepositional phrases, then on Vietnamese noun phrases. The study draws attention to differences with examples. It analyses the heads of noun phrases in the two languages as well as the pre and postmodifications and their positions. It also analyses the uses of the prepositional phrases in the two languages. At the same time, it points out the kinds of errors made by Vietnamese learners in the above-mentioned areas and their causes. Finally, some suggestions are made for those who may be responsible for teaching English as a Foreign Language to younger pupils as well as adults, or to students at universities or colleges

A language is so constructed that the speaker is able to draw out of its resources whatever he wishes to communicate, yet whenever cultural borrowing occurs he cannot altogether avoid borrowing the words which are associated with it. Russian written records indicate that the language has been exposed to numerous foreign influences from very early times. With the intense introduction of "Westernization" since the sixteenth-century both English and French have had a considerable influence on Russian and especially in the twentieth-century this has even increased. For the purpose of this study, therefore, the writer has chosen to analyse English and French loanwords that are found in use in present-day Russian; examples from other languages, especially German, will be given occasionally insofar as they support the arguments presented. This thesis attempts an overall description of the morphological assimilation of loanwords. Phonological analysis and discussion of the socio-cultural context is given consideration in order to enable the reader and the analyst to see this paper as a whole. It was necessary to abstract linguistic elements at different levels of analysis so that some problems that are not explainable at the morphological level, would not be left unsolved. To some extent future borrowings into the Russian language in connection with cultural borrowing may be predicted. The pronounciation of a loanword depends on the degree of assimilation and whether or not the speaker is aware of the fact that it is a borrowing or wants to alert the listener as well. On the whole, loanwords are subject to phonological as well as morphological adjustments. Loanwords are sometimes under the pressure of both the native and foreign morphological systems, which in turn causes fluctuation of forms. Important external factors in the assimilation of loanwords at both levels are the audio and visual means of communication involved in transferring a loanword from either English or French into Russian. An interesting feature for future investigation is the analysis of loanwords on the lexical level and the correlation of lexical patterning with morphology in the process of loanword assimilation. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate

Presents a study of surveying terminology, which may be considered as an under-researched area when compared to legal, medical or business terminologies, focusing on English and Polish. This book provides a wide picture of surveying terminology by looking at problems that diversified groups of users may identify. Kwiatek investigates how surveying terms are created and how they are named in English and Polish; she analyses the concept systems of the two languages with respect to surveying terminology; and she indicates the areas of surveying in which terminology and conceptual differences occur, the factors that trigger them and translation strategies which are used to solve them.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Humanities / Master / Master of Philosophy

The grammar of modification is highly complex and raises numerous questions about the relation between meaning and form. This dissertation provides a study of how modified noun phrases are interpreted and examines the consequences of these results for the syntax of the nominal domain. The discussion centers on two types of modification: superlatives and stacked modification. The data comes primarily from English, but other languages are also discussed. There is initial evidence that the main claims hold across a wide range of languages. The common view on superlatives is that they have two types of interpretations which are the result of a scope ambiguity and that the contrast between them needs to be captured by means of syntactic devices. Contra this standard approach I propose a saliency theory of superlatives which claims that there is no categorical difference between these two interpretations and where the variation in the meaning of superlatives is purely pragmatic in nature. Under this view the meaning of superlatives is a function of the properties of the surrounding discourse and the context-sensitivity of superlatives is subsumed to the more general phenomenon of context-dependency in the interpretation of natural language quantifiers. The saliency theory differs from other analyses that have adopted a discourse approach in that the so-called comparative reading does not depend on the presence or interpretation of focus. Previous approaches to multiple adjectives analyzed their order in terms of the semantics of individual adjectives. I present a new set of data which shows that this is insufficient and propose an explanation that takes into account the meaning of the whole nominal phrase. This result has consequences for how the architecture of grammar should be conceived. In particular, it shows that principles of syntactic well-formedness can sometimes be sensitive to compositional semantic interpretation, as well as pragmatic information. This is in contradiction to many contemporary approaches to grammar where the semantic component has no influence on the syntactic one. / text

<p>This essay deals with translation issues arising when translating a German source text – situated within the field of media communication and political science – into Swedish. More specifically, it focuses on translation problems and solutions in regard to extended participial modifiers and metaphorical expressions.From a translation perspective, complex German pre-nominal participial modifiers are known to pose a challenge to Swedish translators. This depends on language-specific restrictions within the nominal domain. In linguistic translation literature, it is commonly held, that complex pre-nominal participial modifiers cause – in Vinay & Darbelnet’s (1977) terminology – 'transpositions', yielding a Swedish relative clause. This widely held assumption again proved to be right. In some cases, however, other structural options were made use of such as abbreviated (participial) clauses. Also, depending on the complexity of the modifier, transpositions were involved which crossed one or more sentence boundaries. In contrast to complex nominal phrases with pre-nominal participial modifiers, metaphors are usually considered to be stylistically inappropriate in academic discourse. However, a closer examination of the metaphorical expressions appearing in the source text showed that they are almost without exception lexicalized or conventionalized and, therefore, not particularly artistic or daring. The analysis of the translation procedures involved when translating metaphorical expressions was limited to metaphors linked to the area of politics and career, mainly stemming from the conceptual domains: POLITICS IS WAR/A GAME and CAREER IS A JOURNEY. The analysis shows that German and Swedish have similar metaphors, building on those exact concepts. Still, literal translation was not applied in each and every case. In some cases, a neutral periphrasis or a formal equivalent was employed which resulted in a loss or change of some of the semantic aspects inherent to the original metaphor.</p><p>Keywords: <em>translation, nominal phrases, extended modifiers, metaphors</em></p>

Even more novel to the English speaker than the fact that foreign words should represent a problem at all are the frequent, often concerted reactions against them in Germany from the seventeenth century on. These reactions - attempts to eliminate borrowed words and replace them with German expressions - have been relatively little studied and the references in histories of language usually apply to the baroque <u>Sprachgesellschaften</u> and one or two individual purists. No detailed general survey of German purism is available, there is no bibliography on the subject, and the contribution of the purists has not been fully assessed. This study is intended as a preliminary step towards meeting these needs and offers a critical, fully documented account of purism in the hundred years between 1789 and 1889. This period begins with J.H. Campe, the most important German purist, who was the first to approach the question systematically and in great detail, and ends with the Berlin Declaration of 1889 objecting to the policies of the newly founded <u>Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein</u>. The <u>Sprachverein</u> has fully documented its own history and achievements, but for the rest only Campe and F.L. Jahn have been studied critically. I have sought to investigate who the purists were, how they approached language, why they considered purism necessary, what foreign words they rejected, how they tried to replace them, and to give an account of their activity.