Basic Structural Differences Within A Linguistic Comparison Of English And German Grammar

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,7, http: //www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: HpS Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Introduction Since German and English both belong to the same family of languages, i.e. West Germanic, they are - at least, from an historical point of view - closely related languages. By investigating their respective grammatical structures it is to be discussed whether the existing structural contrasts between English and German grammar are related as well. Within this paper the most general and basic of the occurring differences will be summarised and analysed by taking John Hawkins' A Comparative Typology of English and German. Unifying the Contrasts as a basic source. Hawkins argues that where German and English contrast the latter tends to show less correspondence between form and meaning. This is due to his central hypothesis which says that it is possible to establish general principles which unite the major contrasts between both languages (cf. 4). Hawkins assumes that the differences within the grammatical structures are not accidental ones; they are rather systematic and can be traced back to one "ultimate trigger " (5) in the history of the English language - phonological changes which caused all further structural differences as either direct or indirect consequences of this process (cf. 5-7). The attempt of this paper is to draw conclusions from this knowledge of the common historical background and apply it to the modern "versions" of the German and English language and the major patterns of variation. To get a descriptive and lucid image of the contrasts between the two languages, we first start on the level of individual words by considering their morphological structure, i.e. we will examine the inflection of the verb and the case marking of noun phrases. This will lead us directly to questi

A broad coverage of German syntax, providing an in-depth look at object-verb sentence formation in comparison with other languages.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Heidelberg (Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen), language: English, abstract: Generally, Kortmann defines Contrastive Linguistics as the parallel comparison of two languages concerning their language parameters. According to him, it is especially important to identify separate bundles with structural differences and find the relation between them, the so-called “Kontrastbündel” (contrast bundles). Each one of these bundles can be deduced from the construction plan of the contrastive language. In this regard, Kortmann starts his analysis by comparing his purpose of Contrastive Linguistics to its original use. He refers to the fact that in the early 40s till 60s these language differences were considered the reason for the problems occurring when learning a foreign language. Hence, Contrastive Linguistics was primarily important for pedagogical use. The systematic comparison of two languages was supposed to improve the learner’s and teacher’s understanding of the foreign language by for example predicting mistakes often made. In this context, Kortmann sees the previously mentioned Contrastive Hypothesis from Lado as a good explanation for the main factors which trigger contrasts. The Contrastive Hypothesis indicates that similarities between the native language (L1) and the foreign language (L2) lead to an easy and fast learning process whereas differences lead to difficulties and are the main reason for making mistakes. Thus, the basic idea of the Contrastive Hypothesis is the transfer of the characteristics of the native language to the foreign language. Depending on whether this transfer promotes or represses the learning process, it is considered a positive or negative transfer. A negative transfer is also referred to as interference. The most important types of interference are substitution (1), over-differentiation, under-differentiation, over-representation and under-representation (2). Here, Kortmann comments that according to this basic assumption of Contrastive Linguistics only substitution, over-differentiation and under-differentiation can trigger mistakes.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English - Grammar, Style, Working Technique, grade: 1,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: Since English and German belong to the West Germanic family, both languages are - considered from a historical perspective – closely related. However, English and German have developed in entirely different ways over time. While English was strongly influenced by many foreign languages, such as French, German remained closer to the language group both originally derived from. Precisely these divergent developments make a contrastive analysis between the two major languages particularly interesting. Within this paper, English and German will be compared with regard to the passive voice, one form of the grammatical category voice that is, according to König & Gast (2009: 123), easy to identify in English and German and rather unproblematic to compare. In its general meaning, the term voice is used interchangeably with diathesis. In this sense, the concept of voice relates to the argument structure of predicates, i.e. the relationship between thematic roles like Agent, Patient, Instrument and grammatical functions like subject and object, as well as to the alternations found between different argument structures. (ibid.). While diathesis appears to be a characteristic of any verb, voice - in the more restricted understanding of the word – “means the form of a [...] verb which shows whether the person or thing denoted by the subject acts or is acted upon” (Xavier 2008: 50). The narrower concept of voice, thus, differentiates between the active and the passive. In the course of my studies, the grammatical phenomenon of voice has been used several times to exemplarily compare English with German. The system of voice in English and German has been (re-)introduced in the course of this semester ́s seminar English in Contrast. Therefore, my interest in this topic was already raised before the seminar and I found it particularly interesting to learn more about the differences of English and German passives. As a future teacher of both of these major languages, I consider this an excellent opportunity to gain a detailed inside into this matter. This term paper aims at figuring out in how far the passive voice is different in English and German. Despite both languages` very same origin, it is assumed that, due to language change, English and German show considerable differences in the passive voice. The work by König & Gast (2009) will be taken as the basis for a discussion on this question...

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: A, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, language: English, abstract: When semanticists examine the way speakers or writers code the knowledge they expect their listeners or readers to have in a sentence, one of the most important aspects to consider is the information structure of the sentence. Within this information structure, a subdivision is commonly made between already known or given information, which is usually referred to as the ‘topic’ of the sentence, and new information, normally called the ‘focus’. While some languages, for instance Somali, possess explicit focus markers to indicate the focalization of certain elements in a sentence, English has to rely mainly on the intonation of a sentence as the focus marker due to its rigid subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. German, on the other hand, provides a greater syntactic flexibility since it is a highly inflected language in which the grammatical function of words is less defined by their position within a sentence than their grammatical cases. Therefore, speakers of German do not have to rely solely on changing the intonation in order to mark a sentence’s focus, but may also use syntactic displacement as a focus marker. Nevertheless, syntactic changes to focalize certain elements in a sentence are also possible to a limited extent in English, but they require special constructions not necessary for focus marking in German. Since these differences in focus marking seem to be significant in light of the fact that both English and German are Germanic languages, they will constitute the main focus of this paper. I will begin my study of topic and focus in the two languages with an examination of the several strategies for focusing employed in spoken English and German and then continue with those strategies typically used in writing. In doing this, I take account of the limitation of some of these strategies to one of these two different forms of communication.

First published in 1986, this book draws together analyses of English and German. It defines the contrasts and similarities between the two languages and, in particular, looks at the question of whether contrasts in one area of the grammar is systematically related to contrasts in another, and whether there is any ‘directionality’ or unity to contrast throughout grammar as a whole. It is suggested that there is, and that English and German can serve as a case study for a more general typology of languages than we now have. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, including students of Germanic languages; language typologists; generative grammarians attempting to ‘fix the parameters’ on language variation;’ historical linguists; and applied linguists.

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.0, University of Duisburg-Essen (Anglophone Studies), course: Languages around the world, language: English, abstract: This paper aims at providing a comparison of phonological as well as inflectional properties of English and German. It presents an overview of how major differences between both languages correlate with potential problems in language learning. Furthermore, the problems in language learning of two languages of similar historical origin will be examined, in particular German native-speakers in learning English and vice versa. In addition, it might be significant to see how both languages are differently hard to learn. However, it has to be considered that the degree of difficulty in learning one of these languages differs for every individual person. Each section will concentrate on the question whether major differences between English and German correlate with potential problems in language learning, in particular sections 3.2, 4.3 and 5. At first, some background information on these languages will be given. Afterwards, by presenting the phoneme inventory, particularly focusing on interference, this paper takes a specific look at the pronunciation difficulties of second language learners. Additionally, a short definition of the term ‘suffixation’ will be given in order to introduce the topic ‘inflection’. Selected inflectional suffixes in English and German, with focus on nouns and pronouns, will be investigated separately with examples in order to give an overview about this morphologic process in both languages. What is also presented in this section is an extensive comparison of inflectional suffixes. Furthermore, a survey was conducted in which students and people with less English and/or German knowledge were questioned. The survey is concerned with difficulties in learning English and German.