Contrastive Analysis (English)
Instance: 2005/2006 - 2S
Cycles of Study/Courses
Objectives
This course will aim to improve the student's conscious knowledge of the differences and similarities that exist between Portuguese and English. The wider themes will be dealt with generally in class, but special attention will be given to those areas that are of particular interest to Portuguese speakers of English.
Students will be taught how to use monolingual, parallel and comparable corpora to study specific aspects of the lexicon, syntax and semantics using the British National Corpus and Reuter’s Corpus, the CETEMPúblico and COMPARA. They will also be expected to work with the online tools provided by the Linguateca project at http://poloclup.linguateca.pt/ferramentas to analyze specific linguistic problems and to build their own specialized mini-corpora and glossaries.
Program
1.Introduction.
a.An analysis of the grammars, dictionaries, thesauri and other reference material which will be used during the course.
b.An introduction to electronic corpora and software for text and general language analysis.
2.The Lexicon.
a.A general view of lexical and terminological theory.
b.The study and comparison of semantic fields and lexical sets.
c.(Non-) equivalence at word level.
d.(Non-) equivalence above word level - collocation, clichés, idioms etc.
e.Problems related to terminology in technical and scientific areas
f.Construction of bilingual glossaries and mini-corpora.
3.The Sentence.
a.Basic sentence structure in English and Portuguese.
b.Syntactic and semantic aspects of the Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, and Prepositional phrase in English and Portuguese
c.The function of Adjuncts, Conjuncts and Disjuncts in context in English and Portuguese.
d.Theme, focus and information processing at sentence and text level – different conventions in English and Portuguese..
e.The use of cohesive devices in texts.
f.The analysis of real sentences in context.
Main Bibliography
SET BOOKS:
·Baker, Mona. 1992. In Other Words, A coursebook in translation. London and New York: Routledge.
·Downing, Angela & Philip Locke. 1993. A University Course in English Grammar. London and New York: Routledge.
·Mateus, M. Helena Mira, Ana Maria Brito, Inês Duarte & Isabel Hub Faria. 2003. Gramática da Língua Portuguesa. Lisboa: Caminho.
·TEXTS from the "Oficina Gráfica".
Complementary Bibliography
·Portuguese Grammars:
o Cunha, Celso and Lindley Cintra, 1984. Nova Gramática do Português Contemporâneo. Lisboa: Edições João Sá da Costa.
·English Grammars:
o Collins Cobuild English Grammar 1990 London: Collins.
o Greenbaum, Sidney & Randolph Quirk. 1990. A Student's Grammar of the English Language. Longman U.K. Ltd.
o Halliday, M.A.K. 1985 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London. Edward Arnold.
o QUIRK, Randolph et al. 1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London and New York, Longman.
·Dictionaries and Thesauri: Students will be expected to use the various monolingual and bilingual dictionaries in Portuguese and English currently available in traditional and electronic form, and to examine and analyse them critically.
Teaching methods and learning activities
T/P Classes
Software
Not applicable
Evaluation Type
Distributed evaluation with final exam
Eligibility for exams
75% attendance
Calculation formula of final grade
50% theory
50% practice
Examinations or Special Assignments
Class presentations of Practical projects
Special assessment (TE, DA, ...)
Not applicable
Classification improvement
Not applicable
Observations
Language of instruction: English.