Contrastive functional analysis

CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS ANDREW CHESTERMAN University of Helsinki JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/...

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CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

ANDREW CHESTERMAN University of Helsinki

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor: Andreas H. Jucker (Justus Lie big University, Giessen) Associate Editors: Jacob L. Mey (Odense University) Herman Parret (Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp) Jef Verschueren (Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp)

Editorial Address: Justus Liebig University Giessen, English Department Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10, D-35394 Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Editorial Board: Shoshana Blum-Kulka (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Chris Butler (University College of Ripon and York) Jean Caron ( Universite de Poitiers); Robyn Carston (University College London) Bruce Fraser (Boston University); John Heritage (University of California at Los Angeles) David Holdcroft (University of Leeds); Sachiko Ide (Japan Women's University) Catherine Kerbrat-OrecchioQi (University of Lyon 2) Claudia de Lemos (University of Campinas, Biasil); Marina Sbisa (University of Trieste) Emanuel Schegloff (University of California at Los Angeles) Paul 0. Takahara (Kobe City University of Foreign Studies) Sandra Thompson (University of California at Santa Barbara) Teun A. Van Dijk (University of Amsterdam); Richard Watts (University of Bern)

47 Andrew Chesterman

Contrastive Functional Analysis


ANDREW CHESTERMAN University of Helsinki

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

The paper used in this publication meets the mtmmum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chesterman, Andrew Contrastive functional analysis I Andrew Chesterman. p. cm. -- (Pragmatics & beyond, ISSN 0922-842X ; new ser. 47) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Functionalism (Linguistics) 2. Contrastive l~tics. 3. Discourse analysis. I. Title. II. Series. 1998 Pl47.C48 97-50498 410--dc2l ISBN 90 272 5060 X (Eur.) I 1-55619-809-4 (US) (alk. paper) CIP ©Copyright 1998- John Benjamins B. V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

Contents Preface Chapter l. Contrastive 1.1. Similarities 1.1.1. Similarity Assessment 1.1.2. Divergent and Convergent Similarity 1.2. Equivalence in Translation Theory 1.2.1. The Equative View 1.2.2. The Taxonomic View 1.2.3. The Relativist View 1.3. Equivalence in Contrastive Analysis 1.3.1. Tertia Comparationis 1.3.2. Bilingual Competence and Translation Competence 1.4. On Psychological Realism 1.4.1. The Problem of the Psycholinguistic Fallacy 1.4.2. Interference and Re-entry 1.4.3. Universalist vs. Relativist 1.5. CFA methodology 1.5.1. Primary Data l.5.2. Comparability Criterion and Similarity Constraint 1.5.3. Problem and Initial Identity Hypothesis 1.5.4. Hypothesis Testing 1.5.5. Revised Hypotheses

5 5 6 12 16 18 21 24 27 29 37 40 41 44· 48 52 54 55 57 57 59

Chapter 2. Functional 2.1. Grammar as a Tool Factory 2.2. Interpreting the Constraint of Relevant Similarity 2.3. An Outline Model of Semantic Structure 2.3.1. Overview 2.3.2. Predicates 2.3.3. Actants 2.3.4. Specifiers 2.3.5. Complicators

63 63 67 72 74 75 76 79 80

vi


2.3.6. Commentators 2.3.7. Conjunctors 2.3.8. Concluding remarks 2.4. Other Functionalist Models 2.5. Other Contrastive Models

82 83 84 86 90

Chapter 3. Analysis 3.1. States of Disease (English) 3.2. Inclusion (English and Finnish) 3.2.1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data 3.2.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis 3.2.3. Revised Hypotheses 3.3. Invitation to Eat (English, German, French, Swedish, Finnish) 3.3 .1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data 3.3.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis 3.3.3. Revised Hypotheses 3.4. Genericity (English and French) 3.4.1. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data 3.4.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis 3.4.3. Revised Hypotheses 3.5. Speaker perspective (English, German, Finnish) 3.5 .I. Similarity Constraint and Initial Data 3.5.2. Testing the Identity Hypothesis 3.5.3. Revised Hypotheses

93 93 98 98 104 110 112 113 117 122 123 124 127 135 139 139 141 148

Chapter 4. Rhetoric 4.1. Background 4.1.1. Contrastive Text Linguistics 4.1.2. Contrastive Discourse Analysis 4.1.3. Contrastive Rhetoric 4.1.4. Methodological 4.2. Text Types 4.3. Text Actants: Episodes 4.4. Text Specifiers 4.4.1. Point 4.4.2. Profile 4.4.3. Angle 4.4.4. Chronology 4.5. Appeals 4.5.1. Pathos 4.5.2. Ethos

151 154 154 155 157 158 161 165 169 170 171 175 178 179 179 182

CONTENTS

4.6. Coherence 4. 7. Interaction 4.7.1. Exchange 4.7.2. Exchange Types 4.7.3. Moves 4.7.4. Exchange Specifiers 4.7.5. Status Relations 4.7.6. Controls

Chapter 5. Closing Comments 5.1. Applications 5.2. Conclusions References Author index Subject index

VII

183 186 187 187 187 188

192 194 197 197 199 205

225 229

Preface

Contrastive Functional Analysis is a research methodology. It starts from perceived similarities of meaning across two or more languages, and seeks to determine the various ways in which these similar or shared meanings are expressed in different languages. It thus represents one general approach to Contrastive Analysis. It is an approach designated as "functional", in the sense that it is based on meaning and follows the process of semiosis: it looks at the ways meanings are expressed. The perspective is from meaning to form. Research using this methodology also aims to specify the conditions (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic etc.) which govern the use of different variants, and ultimately to state which variant is preferred under which conditions. Broadly speaking, the approach is thus a paradigmatic one, with a Hallidayan-type focus on the options that speakers have in expressing meanings. It is in fact a kind of cross-linguistic variation analysis. Chapter 1 explores general issues of contrastive methodology in some detail. We start with the concept of similarity, how it can be defined,,analysed and assessed. This leads to a comparison of the ways in which the crucial concept of equivalence has been understood and analysed in the two related disciplines of Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis. The contrastive functional approach illustrated in the book is closely related to translation. It also links up with the psycholinguistic concept of interference: the general issue of psychological realism in Contrastive Analysis is discussed, and related to a recent proposal in neurology. The first chapter concludes with a presentation of a falsificationist methodology built around the idea that contrastive studies should produce hypotheses that can be empirically tested. Chapter 2 specifies what is meant by "functional" in this approach. It includes an outline model of a semantic structure framework forming the basis of a functional syntax, and compares this model with other functional and contrastive theories. Chapter 3 offers five sample mini-studies using this methodology, at the clause level or below. The sample studies have been selected to illustrate different aspects of the model; the languages concerned are English, Finnish, German, Swedish and French.

2

CONTRASTIVE FuNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

Chapter 4 then suggests ways in which Contrastive Functional Analysis can be extended beyond clause-level phenomena. The contrastive analysis of textual meaning needs a model of contrastive functional rhetoric. This in turn can be further extended to account for interactional phenomena of contrastive discourse. Chapter 5 reviews the main points of the book and suggests how the methodology might be applied more generally.

Acknowledgements My thanks go first of all to Arto Mustajoki for inviting me to join his functional syntax project for a year and arranging funding from the Finnish Academy. Other members of the project team who kindly read and commented on earlier versions of my manuscript are Hannes Heino and Jyrki Papinniemi. Ulla Connor gave valuable feedback on chapter 4, and Raija Markkanen commented encouragingly on an early version of the book. Susanna Shore offered fruitful criticism and discovered many misprints and slips at the final stage. Two anonymous reviewers from Benjamins provided a wealth of input for the final revision, for which I am most grateful. Responsibility for the final version is of course mine alone. Special thanks to my wife, Marja, for being there. I dedicate the book to our daughter, Sanja: for making so much difference.

AC, Helsinki, November 1997

3

PREFACE

Abbreviations Abbreviations and .:.:ase endings in the Finnish and Swedish glosses are as follows. Nouns and adjectives in the base form, nominative singular, are not given a case gloss. CAUS = causative morpheme COND = conditional mood DET = definite article IMP = imperative INF = infinitive INT =interrogative suffix PAS= passive PAST = past tense PL =plural POS = possessive suffix PP = past participle PRES.P = present participle SG = singular

Finnish cases:

NOM= nominative ACC =accusative GEN = genitive PAR= partitive ESS ~ essive ADE = adessive INE = inessive ALL= allative ABL = ablative ILL = illative ELA = elative COM = comitative 1RA = translative

Chapter 1. Contrastive 1.1.

Similarities

"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" Alice thought she could answer this riddle easily, but no answer is actually indicated in Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Friends to whom I have posed the riddle suggest various answers. A linguist replied immediately: "Because they both begin with an 'r' sound," a response that takes the key terms at the de dicta level. A literary scholar I asked, after a moment's thought, suggested: "Because they can both serve as sources of inspiration for poetry"- alluding to Poe's famous poem "The Raven", plus the traditional image of the poet seated at a desk, quill in hand. This solution to the riddle thus revolves round a semantic ambiguity of the word source in the scholar's reply. Further, ravens and writingdesks are felt to do similar things or have similar effects in their capacity as sources, they are felt to have the same function. In his Annotated A lice, Gardner ( 1970: 95) informs us that Carroll' s own answer had been: "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front" - with a pun on notes. Other answers Gardner records have exploited homonymy in some way: "because Poe wrote on both" (on top of, on the subject of); "bills and tales are among their characteristics" (bill of a bird, bill to be paid; tails, tales); "because it slopes with a flap" (flap of a wing, flap (lid) of a desk). Another poses a common semantic element: "because they both stand on legs". And yet another combines this with semantic ambiguity: "because they both ought to be made to shut up". One answer that takes the de dicta reading one absurd step further has been: "because there is aB in 'both'". The various answers thus fall into several groups, they play with various kinds of likeness: -purely formal (two occurrences of the same sound) -homonymic (same aural or visual form, different meanings: puns) -semantic (same semantic feature) -functional (similar function or purpose) Alice' s riddle introduces some of the main leitmotifs of the first part of this book. Theoretically, what does it mean to compare or contrast two things? How does

6


one set about establishing similru;ities and differences? On what grounds are two different things (a raven and a writing-desk, for instance) proposed for comparison in the first place? What does it mean to say that two things are "the same", or "similar"? Why is it that different people see different likenesses between the same pair of entities? With respect to the study of language and language behaviour, there are two fields in particular that deal with such issues: Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis. Although these are neighbouring disciplines, it nevertheless often appears that theoretical developments in one field are overlooked in the other, and that both would benefit from each other's insights. But before I take up this challenge, let us pause to examine one fundamental concept in some detail: the concept of similarity. My aim will then be to apply this conceptual analysis to the ways in which "sameness" has been understood in Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis, as various notions of "equivalence". This will lead to an explicit specification of the concept of contrastiveness upon which Contrastive Functional Analysis is based.

1.1.1. Similarity Assessment Similarity is a problematic concept. Some of its logical and philosophical puzzles are discussed by Sovran ( 1992). For instance, if "similarity" is a relation between two entities, it ought to have some regular logical properties; but this seems not to be the case. Similarity is not necessarily symmetrical, for instance: we can say (1), but are unlikely to say (2): (1) (2)

This copy of the Mona Lisa is incredibly like the original. ? The Mona Lisa is incredibly like this copy of it.

Similes, too, are non-reversible: (3) (4)

Richard fought like a lion. ? The/A lion fought like Richard.

Similarity is not necessarily transitive, either: if A is similar to B, and B is similar to C, it is not logically implied that A is similar to C. Finnish ginger biscuits are often like stars in terms of their shape (because of their cultural associations with Christmas), and stars are like glow-worms in that both glimmer, but it does not therefore follow that such ginger biscuits are like glow-worms in any way. An underlying cause of these problems seems to be the ambiguous nature of the concept of similarity itself, for it does not pertain only to the world of logic

CONTRASTIVE

7

or physical matter, or indeed the social world, but also to that of cognition. We speak of entities "being similar", but also of them "being thought of as similar". Similarity seems to be both "out there", objective, and also "in the mind", subjective. Triangles are all objectively similar in that they have three sides; but you and I can perceive quite different similarities between ravens and writingdesks. It will therefore be helpful to make an initial distinction between what I will refer to as similarity-as-trigger (objective) and similarity-as-attribution (subjective). Similarity-as-trigger is intended to capture the notion of a particular relation existing between entities in the world, a relation that impinges upon human perception, from matter to mind, in a particular way: different triangles do indeed have three sides. Similarity-as-attribution is the result of the opposite movement, from mind to matter: it results from the subjective, cognitive process of perceiving two entities as being similar, and perhaps classifying them accordingly (e.g. as words beginning with a given sound). Both aspects of similarity are always present. Other traditional puzzles concern the quantification of similarity, whether we can measure degrees of similarity, and if so, how? There have been two main models of similarity assessment in cognitive psychology (see e.g. the papers in Cacciari (ed.) 1995). One is the mental distance model, according to which concepts referring to entities perceived as similar are located closer to each other in the mind; the degree of similarity can then be represented in terms of multi-dimensional scaling, so that relative similarity is reflected in the relative proximity of values on particular dimensions. The second model is known as the feature or contrast model; here, similarity is seen in terms of overlapping feature sets, with the degree of overlap representing the degree of similarity. This model was originally proposed to account for some of the difficulties experienced by the mental distance model, such as the lack of symmetry in certain similarity relations. The classical source of this approach is Tversky (1977). Let us look at this model in more detail. Tversky argued that the degree of similarity between two objects can be measured in terms of the number of shared and distinctive features that characterize them, i.e. in terms of their degree of feature matching. A "feature" is defined as any property of the object "that can be deduced from our general knowledge of the world" (329). On this view, we can propose the following preliminary definitions: (a) Two entities are similar if they share at least one feature. (b) Two entities are the same if neither has features that the other lacks. A single shared feature would obviously mean no more than minimal similarity. Maximum similarity would lead to confusion between the two objects concerned:

8


in fact, degree of similarity might be measured in terms of probability of confusion - a point to which we shall return. As they stand, neither of these definitions is adequate. The first depends on the second, in that shared features are presumably (instances of) the same feature. But the list of features that any entity can be said to have is presumably open-ended: any entity may then be similar to any other entity in some respect. Virtually any two entities may share at least some attributes and hence be "similar" precisely with respect to those attributes that are shared. The whole point of riddles such as Alice' s, of course, is that they juxtapose two entities that at first sight seem very different, and by so doing challenge the hearer to find attributes that are nevertheless shared. Such riddles, we might say, wittily remind us that all entities in the universe are related somehow. Goodman (1972) argues that this is one reason why similarity is so insidious as a philosophical concept. Riddles aside, however, the concept of similarity naturally becomes vacuous if anything can be said to be similar to anything. "Similarity" must accordingly be constrained in some way, particularly if we are to pinpoint the essence of the concept as it is expressed in everyday language, in the true Wittgensteinian spirit. One way of introducing such a constraint is via prototype theory: features are conceived of as being present or absel).t to a certain degree, not absolutely, "and similarities are assessed in terms of relative closeness to a prototype. The prototype thus serves as a tertium comparationis. In other words, the relation of the assessed entities to the prototype takes precedence over other possible dimensions of assessment. Here too, however, the relative closeness tends to be conceptualized in terms of features: robins are more similar to eagles than penguins are, because although all three are birds the first two are closer to the prototype "bird" since they share the prominent prototypical feature "ability to fly".

This suggests that some notion of prominence itself is actually what provides the necessary constraint. Goodman (1972) appeals to the relative "importance" of different features, so that judgements of similarity are in practice made by calculating all the shared important properties only, or rather "the overall importance of the shared properties" (444); but of course "importance" is itself a volatile, shifting concept, always relative to context and interest. Other terms that have been used to capture this necessary constraint on feature-counting are salience and relevance: only features that are salient or relevant should count in the attribution or measurement of similarity. Salience (also labelled prominence by some) is another complex notion. Tversky ( 1977) argues that it is determined both by the intensity of individual features and by their diagnosticity (i.e. how significant they are for a given similarity judgement). Intensity, thus understood and defined, is a quality

CONTRASTIVE

9

intrinsic to the entity itself, as colours or lights or sounds exhibit various degrees of intensity regardless of who observes them. It is defined objectively, e.g. for sounds in terms of decibels. It tends to be stable across different contexts, it is less bound by perception or context. Intensity in this sense is thus primarily a quality of similarity-as-trigger. Tversky' s diagnosticity is close to what others would call relevance. Judgements of similarity are, after all. ways of organizing and clarifying one's mental representations of the world. This is precisely the point made by Sperber and Wilson (1986: 103), who claim that "the relevance of new information to an individual is to be assessed in terms of the improvements it brings to his representation of the world." Endorsing the link between similarity and relevance, they suggest further that "a proper account of the perception of resemblance in general should be based on a well-developed notion of relevance" (232-3). In terms of their theory of relevance, this means roughly that the way we perceive similarities depends on (a) the effect this perception will have on our immediate cognitive environment, and (b) the effort that needs to be expended in the perception process. Some similarities are harder to perceive than others, but may therefore become more significant when they are perceived. Dali has a painting called "Ch~i_st of St. John of the Cross" in which the central shape on the cross is very similar· to that of an ox skull, the outstretched arms being like ~he horns, etc.; the perception of this similarity affects the whole way one sees the picture. (See website http://www .trentgrf.com/hunt/d 105 .htm.) Other similarities are immediately obvious, so obvious that we seldom bother to become conscious of them (the colour of the folder on my desk is very close to that of the card-box next to it, and I call them both "green", but I seldom need to be actually aware of this similarity). With respect to similarity judgement, diagnosticity is entirely contextbound; it depends on the whole frame of reference, the purpose of the judgement and the intentions of the person judging. As Goodman (1972) puts it, "similarity is relative, variable, culture-dependent" (438) and also theory-bound. The same pair of entities can be judged by the same person to be similar or different depending on the context or frame of reference. Imagine a simple size judgement: oranges are to be assessed as either big or small. Given a single pair consisting of a small orange of 4 cm diameter and a middle-sized one of 7 cm diameter, we will no doubt place the middle-sized one in the "big" category. But if a third and enormous orange of, say, 12 cm diameter is introduced into the set, the middlesized one will probably be reclassified as "small", in the new context provided by the addition of the enormous one. "Circumstances alter similarities" (Goodman 1972: 445).

10


Salience, because of its component of diagnosticity, is thus not an absolute concept. That is, a given feature of an entity is not salient per se. It is salient to someone, to an observer, from a particular point of view. Likewise, a given feature is relevant with respect to some purpose or, again, from a particular point of view. Judgements of salience or relevance are of course made by someone, but it is important to appreciate that the very concepts themselves are relative in this sense. In other words, this relativity pertains to similarity-as-attribution. Semiotically speaking, after all, "similarity" is a sign that is attributed to a set of entities, attributed by someone and also interpreted by someone. Furthermore, like relevance, salience is also relative within itself: a feature is not judged absolutely, as salient or not salient, but as more or less salient. Salience is obviously a matter of degree: different features will have different. weightings for salience. This point has been stressed in psychological research on judgements of similarity degree in sorting experiments. Tversky, for instance, showed that judgements of similarity do indeed depend heavily on context: asked to estimate the relative degree of similarity between Austria and other countries, subjects responded quite differently in the context of "Austria, Sweden, Poland and Hungary" as compared to "Austria, Sweden, Norway and Hungary". In the first context, the country most similar to Austria was felt to be Sweden; in the second, Austria was felt to be most similar to Hungary. In other words, the context affects the salience of various distinctive versus shared features, and this in turn affects judgements of relative similarity. Tversky summarizes this point as follows (1977: 344). Classifications based on relative similarity are not determined by similarities among the objects themselves. Rather, "the similarity of objects is modified by the manner in which they are classified". Similarity thus not only serves as a basis for classification (i.e. causally, similarity-as-trigger), but also results from and is modified by the particular classification adopted (derivatively, similarity-as-attribution). Compare the way in which Sperber and Wilson ( 1986: 39) regard the cognitive ability of sight as a simile for other cognitive abilities. What is visible to someone is argued to be a function both of the physical environment itself and of the person's visual abilities. Similarly, a fact is said to be "manifest" to an individual if he or she can represent it mentally. The total set of manifest facts accessible to an individual comprises his or her cognitive environment. A person's cognitive enviroment is thus a function of physical environment and cognitive abilities. In my terms, this physical environment includes instances of similarity-as-trigger; the cognitive abilities includes the ability to attribute and assess similarity. To attribute similarity is to represent it mentally.

CONTRASTIVE

11

Further: just as some things are more visible than others, some facts are also more manifest than others in a given environment, again depending partly on the environment itself and partly on an individual's cognitive abilities: in other words, depending on the degree of salience. Sovran refers to other studies which also complicate the picture of similarity-as-attribution. It seems, for instance, that judgements of visual similarity (e.g. between pictures of landscapes) are based more on distinctive features, whereas judgements of verbal similarity (e.g. between descriptions of meals) are based more on shared features. Some researchers point out, moreover, that it is not a priori clear what is to count as a feature at all, and that the basis for similarity judgements is thus also unclear. Here again the appeal must be to salience. Similarity judgements also vary across subjects even in the same context, as the different responses to Alice's riddle indicate. Different subjects focus on different features of the situation, assess salience in different ways. And even a single subject may make (or appear to make) different similarity assessments at different times, even within the same conversation. Recall Hamlet's exchange with Polonius (III.2.400-406): Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale.

A further point about similarity that will be of theoretical significance in due course is the relation between the range of items assessed as being similar, and the degree of the similarity assessed. The relation is one of inverse correlation. That is, the greater the extension of the set of items assessed as being similar, the less the pertinent degree of similarity. (Many things are green, but few are the precise shade of green of my folder.) At one extreme, as suggested above, anything can be seen as similar to anything else, or even everything to everything else: at this level, however, the degree of similarity is of course very slight. When an assessment increases the degree of similarity that is deemed to be relevant, this then diminishes the range of items that can qualify as being similar. (Humans share many genes with chimpanzees, more with other members of the human species, and more still with their own parents.) At the other extreme, the specification of degree of similarity is so demanding - amounting in fact to "identity" - that nothing is assessed as being similar to anything else: at this

12


level, everything is different. (No-one is genetically identical to me.) Between these extremes, judgements of similarity therefore involve establishing a compromise between degree of similarity and range of similarity. The establishment of this compromise is of course determined by relevance, by the purpose of the assessment. When we say or perceive that something is similar to something else, we are thus doing something rather complex. Medin and Goldstone ( 1995) argue that similarity judgements are creative, constructive processes in the mind of the comparison-maker, affected by directionality (A is like B vs. B is like A), relevance or salience, context, purpose, and so on. Logically, similarity is a multi-placed predicate, not a two-place one (A is like B) nor even a three-placed one (A is like B in respect C): when we say that A is similar to B, what we really mean is that "A is similar to Bin respects C according to comparison process D, relative to some standard E mapped onto judgments by some function F for some purpose G" (1995: 106). Medin and Goldstone' s paper reports some of the empirical, experimental evidence behind this statement. The details are not relevant to my argument here, but their general conclusion serves to substantiate some of the main points I have made in this section. 1.1.2. Divergent and Convergent Similarity

Sovran's (1992) approach to an analysis of similarity is to set up a taxonomy covering a number of English lexemes in the broad semantic field of similarity. She groups these items into various sub-domains representing types of similarity: repetition, copy, reconstruction, mistaken identification, the type-token relation, representation, and analogy. Sovran's main contribution to the debate is the proposal that similarity (which subsumes sameness) is not a unitary concept at all, and that its various sub-domains are qualitatively different; and further that these sub-domains display a tension between the two tendencies of "oneness" and "separate individuation". In effect, we are offered a binary concept of similarity that I find extremely fruitful. Sovran clarifies as follows: (a) The 'oneness' starting point. Adapting Sovran somewhat, I shall call this divergent similarity, and symbolize it thus: A~

A', A", A'" ...

Divergent similarity describes a relation resulting from a process that moves from one to more-than-one. The original "one" is usually conceived of as a kind of

CONTRASTIVE

13

standard, as having higher status or temporal priority. Prototypical examples are similarity via duplication (5) and forgery (6); less prototypical are examples of reconstruction (7) or of mistaken identity (8) (examples from Sovran). (5) (6) (7)

(8)

They manufactured hundreds of copies of the same product every day. This is a forgery of the original painting. The rebuilt church looks very much like the destroyed original building. You look so much like your father, I was sure you were he. (In other words, A' was mistakenly thought to be A.)

(b) The 'separateness' starting point. I shall call this convergent similarity, and symbolize it thus:

This symbolization is intended to capture the idea that A converges towards B and B towards A. (In its simplest form, illustrated here, this similarity exists between two entities, but it is of course not restricted to two.) Two entities start by being separate, and the similarity relation creates a bridge, a mutual approximation, between them. The movement is from more-than-one to one. Here, no assumption is made concerning priority status between the two: both have equal status. Prototypical examples are similarity as resemblance (9) or analogy (10) (Sovran's examples again). (9) They look very much the same. (10) There is a certain analogy between the two countries' policies. Of Sovran's set of sub-domains, the only one so far unaccounted for is the typetoken one, which seems to be the most complex. At first sight, we might hypothesize that the difference between token-identity and type-identity would correspond to the conceptual difference between sameness and similarity. To test this via English, let us assume that a prototypical expression of the notion of sameness in English is the lexeme same, and for similarity correspondingly the lexeme similar. In favour of the hypothesis we can then point to evidence such as the following: ( 11) Both teams have the same number of players, viz.: eleven. ( 12) Sue and Sam arrived on the same day: October 4, 1994.

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(13) This is the same pen I used yesterday- I remember the toothmarks. (14) There should be a similar number of people in each group, somewhere between 10 and 15, say. (the same range) (15) We had a similar day last week- mist in the morning and then bright sunshine later. (same kind of weather) (16) These two pens look similar, but one is more expensive than the other. (same class of appearance) Indeed, with respect to similarity, any sorting task must by definition rely on people's ability to perceive similarity in terms of same-category-membership, in terms of entities seen as tokens of the same type. On this view, the puzzle facing Alice is simply: what category (what type) can be postulated such that both ravens and writing-desks can be said to be members of it (tokens)? However, with respect to sameness the situation is not that simple: the difference between English similar and same is not at all clear-cut. Consider examples such as the following (from Sovran): ( 17) "I want a different apple." "Why? They are all the same." (18) They wore the same dress. (i.e. same style and colour) (19) I'll have the same as her. (said to a waiter) In such examples, same clearly denotes not identity of referent but membership of the same class; in other words, it denotes not identity of token but identity of type. In fact, same is frequently ambiguous between type and token identity: example (18) above is given a type-reading by the gloss, but (out of context) a token reading is equally possible (i.e. Sue wore the dress on Monday and then lent it to Sarah, who wore it on Tuesday). To hypothesize that same automatically denotes token-identity is thus an oversimplification. Correspondingly, although the concept of similarity necessarily excludes tokenidentity, the concept of sameness applies equally well to both token and typeidentity. It should be stressed, however, that the slippage between sameness and similarity evidenced by these two English lexemes may differ from similar slippages in other languages. In Finnish, for instance, the standard word for 'same' (sama) cannot be used to express the type-identity in (17), and would be unlikely in (18) as a type reading; but it can give the type-reading in (19). The point nevertheless remains: that sameness does not always correlate exclusively with token-identity. Sovran argues that type-token relations, illustrated by examples (14-19), depend on a combination of (what I have called) divergent and convergent

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similarity. Looked at from type to tokens, the relation is divergent; looked at from tokens to type, it is convergent. With respect to the two macrolinguistic fields concerned with multi-lingual matters, the approach usually taken in Translation Theory focuses on divergent similarity and that usually taken in Contrastive Analysis on convergent similarity. That is, a translation starts with a single phenomenon and derives others from it which retain a relation of similarity with the original; whereas a contrastive analysis starts with two different phenomena which are already assumed to contain some features of similarity. As we shall see, Translation Theory has tended to take different views on equivalence, depending on the tolerated degree of divergence between the derived phenomenon and the original; Contrastive Analysis has tended to view equivalence more stringently, so that the relation between different phenomena is seen as convergence or non-convergence, identity or non-identity. This difference will have some bearing on the discussion of equivalence below. The final point I wish to borrow from Sovran concerns the role played by the imagination in the attribution of similarity. This is initially suggested (in Sovran's article) by the polysemy of the Hebrew word dimyon, which means both 'imagination' and 'resemblance'. Sovran links this insight to other data (such as the grammar of as, as an operator of similarity in English), and to cognitive procedures underlying deixis. The details do not concern us here, but the general conclusions are thought-provoking. The gist of the argument is that similarity "has its origins in imagination and creation, as well as in making precise and in recognizing" (342). Similarity is closely bound up with perception and cognition. We can identify entities, e.g. by naming them or otherwise referring to them, deictically locating them; and we can classify them, in terms of perceived similarities with other entities. To perceive a similarity is to see something as something else, to imagine it in a particular way. The ability to perceive similarities is thus limited only by the range of the human imagination. Alice's riddle challenges her to "scan the feature space" (as Tversky would put it) in her imagination, in search of an appropriate frame of reference within which at least one shared feature could be located. In relevance-theoretical terms again: the more puzzling the riddle- i.e. the more unlikely the proposed similarity - the greater the processing effort required to solve it, and the greater the "contextual effect" or "cognitive effect" of the eventual solution, with this effect being construable as something like "intellectual satisfaction". The above-mentioned recourse to the imagination also supplies a solution to the paradox we encountered earlier about the definition of sameness. Whether or not two entities are the same (with respect to all salient features) is actually

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beside the point; there will always be features, albeit perhaps not salient ones, which separate any two entities. ·But the point is whether or not two entities count as the same, within a given frame of reference and for the purpose in hand. And whether something counts as something else is, ultimately, a question of imagination. The ability to see something "as" something else is, after all, central to human cognition, as Sovran also stresses. Indeed, Wierzbicka ( 1980) takes the concept of "being thought of as" to be one of her fundamental set of only thirteen semantic primitives. Let me now recapitulate my own main points so far, points that will count as basic building-blocks for what will follow. (a) The concept of similarity is Janus-faced. It simultaneously refers to a relation-in-the-world and a perception-in-the-mind. The element of subjective perception is always present in any judgement of similarity. (b) Two entities are perceived to be similar to the extent that their salient features match. (c) Two entities count as the same within a given frame of reference if neither is perceived to have salient features which the other lacks. (d) Assessments about what counts as a feature and how salient a feature is are both context-bound (where context includes the purpose of the assessment) and assessor-bound. (e) Assessments of similarity are thus constrained by relevance. (f) Degree of similarity correlates inversely with the extension of the set of items judged to be similar. (g) Two main types of similarity relation can be distinguished: divergent and convergent. Similarity has traditionally entered Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis under the rubric of "equivalence", a term which has been given a wide variety of interpretations in these two fields. The next two sections examine these interpretations, and assess the degree of overlap between them.

1.2.

Equivalence in Translation Theory

As we shall see, Contrastive Analysis frequently makes recourse to what it calls "translation equivalence"; however, the concept has also evolved somewhat independently in the older field of Translation Theory, where it is of course

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ubiquitous. By way of necessary background, this section offers a concise overview of the concept of equivalence in Translation Theory. First of all, recall that the word for translation itself in many languages (lndo-European ones at least) goes back to an etymology of 'carrying across' or 'setting across'. (In Finnish, by contrast, the image is one of 'turning', which well fits the notion of divergent similarity!) That which is carried across is not expected to change en route, it is expected to be "the same" on arrival, as one might carry a man across a river and set him on the opposite bank unaltered. (The man carried across the river is of course some minutes older when he gets to the other bank, some of the atoms composing him have gone elsewhere, etc.; but such changes are irrelevant here.) Or, to use another well-worn image, as one might carry a set of clothes in a suitcase through the border customs from one country to another, being required by the customs officials to open the suitcase, unpack and then repack; the actual clothes would nevertheless remain the same. We have a temporal process, in which something- call it A- already existing "before" the process, is assumed to remain the same "after" the process, in its new state as A'. Let us call this the translation identity assumption, formalized simply as: A (tl) =A' (t2) where tl denotes 'time before' and t2 denotes 'time after'. The only difference between before and after is thus e.g. 'the geographical position of the man who was carried across the river' or 'the packed arrangement of the clothes taken through customs'. This formula is of course reminiscent of the one often used to represent metaphor: X= Y. That is, in some sense something (X) "is" something else (Y). X and Y are different entities, but in some sense they are "the same". Jasper "is" a pig when he eats sp&ghetti, in the opinion of those who observe him. And indeed, the term metaphor and its cognates in other languages also goes back to exactly the same origin as translation, the notion of carrying across or beyond. Implictly, then (in In do-European cultures at least), translation has been thought of in very much the same way as metaphor is thought of. A translated text (a target text) "is a metaphor of' its source text. In the theory of metaphor, the element that the metaphor is based on, by virtue of which Jasper is said to be a pig, has sometimes been called the ground (Richards 1936). In this metaphor, the ground is something like 'messy way of eating'. The fact that this ground is deemed to be common to both Jasper and a typical pig is the motivation for the use of the metaphor; and the ability of a reader or hearer to interpret the metaphor depends precisely on the understanding of this common ground. A metaphor, in

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other words, builds upon a perceived similarity between two entities; so does translation. The big problem for Translation Theory, in a nutshell, has been: what is the ground by virtue of which we can say that something is a translation of something else? I will distinguish three broad approaches: the equative view, the taxonomic view, and the relativist view.

1.2.1. The Equative View This approach is perhaps the oldest one (see e.g. Kelly 1979; Rener 1989). It is based on the original mathematical definition of equivalence, denoting a reversible relation: A is B and B is A. The classical Greek view of language was

architectural·. language is a structure composed of elements, words, which function as signs. Signs represent meanings; meanings are absolute, unchanging, they are manifestations of the ideal, they are Platonic Ideas. Changing the sign (sonum) had no effect on the meaning (significatio). To translate (for Augustine, for instance) meant decomposing the original structure, extracting the bricks with which it was constructed, and building a new structure from the same bricks. The bricks themselves remained constant. Identity of meaning, of the signified, was thus supported (and in fact guaranteed) by a particular view of language, including certain beliefs about meaning. Such an approach to translation appears to have been heavily influenced by the uses to which translation was put at the time, and other more general beliefs of the scholars who thought about these matters. The postulation of significatio identity was in fact one way of getting round a serious paradox. Namely: many of these early scholars were concerned with the translation of the Bible. If you believed that the Bible was indeed the Word of God, as originally uttered in Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic, how could you meddle with it without committing sacrilege? On the one hand, the original was sacred; on the other, God himself had instructed believers to spread the message. The obvious solution was to set up a theory of translation based on a separation of form and meaning: the form would necessarily change during the process from one language to another, but the meaning could be assumed to remain constant. Hence a belief in the identity of meaning across translation. The belief was of course a vulnerable one, and was gradually chipped away from different angles. There were many source-text words whose meaning nevertheless seemed to change in translation. One solution was to use loanwords (such as the incorporation of Hebrew amen into Latin) as a way of guaranteeing the required identity; but this could not be used all the time. Another solution was to admit the necessity of some change but to reduce this as far as possible by

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adopting a strategy of minimum formal change. This strategy was also supported by the idea that not only the meaning or message but also the very form of the original text was sacred. St. Jerome, patron saint of translation, is quoted as having believed quite explicitly that in Holy Writ, "even the order of the words is a mystery" (Huetius, [1683] 1992: 92). The issue is thus felt to be an ethical one: referring to his own translation practice, Erasmus wrote that he preferred "to sin through excessive scrupulousness rather than through excessive license" ([1506] 1992: 60). The consequence of such attitudes was therefore an emphasis on literal translation, based ultimately on an enormous respect for the original text. The equative view has two fundamental weaknesses. Consider first the identity metaphor which underlies it, that of carrying something across in such a way that it remains unchanged. The trouble with this metaphor is that it only captures part of the notion of translation, and hence gives a distorted picture of the whole. In transporting something across from A to B, there is only one something (say, a man to be carried across a river); and upon arrival at B the something is, by definition, no longer at A. The identity of the something is thus guaranteed by the assumed material constancy of all objects through reasonably short- or mid-term time spans. But in translation this is not the case. A source text (or message or meaning) does not disappear from the source culture by virtue of its translation into a target culture; it continues to exist at its source. The whole idea of translation as movement is thus misleading. Translation is not equative, but additive. The point can be formalized very simply. Whereas the equative view is based on the identity assumption and is denoted (omitting the temporal aspect) by A=A' the additive view of the translation process is A==>A+A' That is: the source text remains the same (A), but the process has given rise to an additional text at time 2, the target text A'. This formula highlights several points which clash with the identity 'assumption. It captures the idea that translatiop is a process of addition: a text is added to the universe of texts, new potential readers are added to those for whom the original message is accessible. Furthermore, the status of the source text itself is now 'value-added', since it is now a text-thathas-a-translation, no longer a text-on-its-own. Translation is additive in another sense too, in that a given text can be translated several times, at different periods, by different people, for different purposes, and so on, hence giving rise to

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several target texts; there may be not only A', but also A", A'" etc. Further, unlike the mathematical definition of an equivalence relation, the translation relation is not normally reversible: back-translated texts very seldom. end up being the same as the original source. (Obvious exceptions are word-level translations of many technical terms.) But what of the relation between A and A' etc.? If the metaphor of constancy-through-movement is abandoned, the very notion of identity becomes demoted. On this view, the relation between A and A' etc. is very like the relation of divergent similarity mentioned in the previous section, which was symbolized as A:::} A', A", A'" ... Applying this to translation, and incorporating the fact that the source text does not disappear, and also that a given source text may have many translations, we get: A:::} A,A',A",A"' ... This illustrates that the only true identity that is preserved through the temporal process is that of A itself (albeit with value-added status). The target text, A' in the first place, is not identical with its source A, but only divergently similar to it. The first argument against the equative view is therefore that it is based on a misleading metaphor. The second argument is that the equative view is based on the converse accident fallacy: it generalizes non-validly from one particular text-type to all text-types. It is, after all, manifestly not the case that all source texts have the same kind of high, sacred status as Holy Scripture. Some are certainly valued as such - legal texts, some philosophical texts, for instance - but many more are not. Translation practice through the ages has of course recognized this. Competent professional translators have always translated different texts in different ways as a matter of course, sometimes more literally, sometimes more freely (see e.g. Bass nett 1991). From this point of view, the equative approach is far too narrow, and also too uniform in its evidently false assumption that all source texts form a homogeneous set, and moreover that sacred texts are prototypical examples of this set.

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1.2.2. The Taxonomic View To counter criticisms such as these, proposals have been made that equivalence is not a unitary concept but consists of several types. Different types of equivalence are argued to be appropriate in the translation of different kinds of texts. Alternatively, some types are argued to be more important than other types, so that for each text (or text-type) there is a hierarchy of types of equivalence. In these ways, the concept of equivalence is argued to be context-sensitive. In the Western tradition we can trace the beginnings of this view in Jerome, who held that non-sacred texts should be translated more freely than sacred ones: however equivalence was to be defined for non-sacred texts, it was not felt to be strictly equative in the sense discussed above. We also find explicit comments by later translators which demonstrate their own need to work with a taxonomy of equivalence. In its simplest form, this appears as a division between equivalence of form or style versus equivalence of content. To take just one example: in the 17th century Cowley stated quite explicitly that his aim in translating Pindar was not to preserve the content of the original but its style (Steiner 1975: 66); indeed he felt quite free to omit, select and add what he pleased in the actual content. On a more theoretical level, many explicit taxonornies of equivalence have been proposed during the past 30 years or so. I will mention just a few, to illustrate the general approach. An early and influential example is the distinction made by Nida (1964) between formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. The binary division here is between the form-and-meaning of a message on the one hand, and the effect of a message on the other. Nida argued that translators (of the Bible, too) should give a higher priority to dynamic equivalence, so that the target text would have the same effect on its readers as the source text did on the original readers. An important corollary of this is the priority Nida gives to naturalness in the target text, since unnatural style is a factor that interferes with, and alters, the effect of the message. By thus stressing the importance of the role played by text-reception in influencing the translation process, Nida helped to shift theoretical attention away from texts-as-such to texts-as-people-use-them; semiotic ally, this meant a shift towards pragmatics, towards users and interpreters of signs. Catford ( 1965: 27) makes a different distinction. On the one hand, he postulates "formal correspondence", which exists between source and targetlanguage categories when they occupy "as nearly as possible, the 'same' place" in the "economies" of the two languages. Thus defined, formal correspondence denotes an approximation, an optimal or maximal closeness, not a true identity: 'same' is hedged by the quotation marks. On the other hand, there is "textual" or "translation equivalence", which denotes the relation between a text-portion in a

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source text and whatever text-portion is observed to be equivalent to it in a given target text. Textual equivalence is thus no more than the relation that de facto exists between any source text and a target text that is accepted as being a translation of it. Textual equivalents are not defined by a translation theory but discovered in practice, via the authority of a competent translator or bilingual. Catford argues that the condition for translation equivalence is "interchangeability in a given situation" (49). Expressions in different languages rarely "mean the same" in all respects; but they are mutually translatable insofar as they relate to "(at least some of) the same features of [situational] substance" (50). That is, the common ground is to be found in the situation itself, not in the semantics of sentences: there is no equivalence of meaning, since meanings are language-specific, and so we cannot "transfer meaning" from one language to another. We can translate I have arrived into Russian asja prisla not because they "mean the same"- they don't- but because there is an overlap between the sets of situational features which both utterances select as relevant: there is a speaker, there is an arrival, and this arrival is a prior event. The fact that each utterance also selects other situational features (such as the sex of the speaker in Russian) does not invalidate their mutual translatability. Notice how close Catford's view is here to the theory of similarity assessment advocated by Tversky (discussed above). What we have is, precisely, a process of feature matching. In different terminology, we could frame Catford's position as follows. I We have three potential kinds of equivalence: formal equivalence, which can only '\ be approximate; semantic equivalence, which is theoretically impossible; and , situational equivalence, which is the basis for translation. The underlying belief, of course, is that situational equivalence actually exists, at least insofar as we can speak of "the same features of substance" as being present in the source and target situations. Significantly, Catford uses no quotes around "same" here: this is indeed the locus of his identity assumption. Catford's view is also relevant to my own argument in that he too rejects the movement metaphor: nothing is transferred from A to B in translation. Rather, he defines translation as the process of "replacing" textual material in one language with textual material in another (20). Although situational features may be "the same", predicting what will be replaced by what, in any actual instance of translation, is a matter of probability. Unconditioned probabilities of equivalence specify the likelihood of a given source-language item being replaced-in-translation by various target-language items: the probability of French dans being translated into English as in is .73, according to a sample analysed by Catford (1965: 30), compared with a .19 chance of appearing as into. Conditioned probabilites, on the other hand, include

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a specification of the conditions under which a given source item tends to get translated as a given target item: in the environment of a preceding verb of motion and a following locative noun, for example, the probability of dans being translated as into is practically l. Specifying conditioned probabilities between language pairs is precisely the challenge for machine translation, of course. Catford also suggests a further extension, to which we shall return in the following chapter; he· writes (31 ): Provided the sample is big enough, translation-equivalence-probabilities may be generalized to form 'translation rules' applicable to other texts, and perhaps to the 'language as a whole' -or, more strictly, to all texts within the same variety of the language [... ]. A rather different taxonomy of equivalence in Translation Theory has been proposed by Koller (e.g. 1979), comprising five types: (i) Denotative equivalence (otherwise known as invariance of content, semantic equivalence); (ii) Connotative equivalence (including equivalence of style, register, and frequency); (iii) Text-normative equivalence (concerning text-type usage norms); (iv) Pragmatic equivalence (receiver-oriented, equivalence of effect); (v) Formal equivalence (including aesthetic· and poetic features). For Koller, these types represent various qualities or values or features of the source text that "must be preserved" as far as possible. They may have different priorities and form different hierarchies in different text-types and translation assignments: pragmatic equivalence often takes precedence over the other types. Some types are in principle more attainable than others: in principle, denotative equivalence should, he claims, always be attainable (contrary to Catford!); coimotative equivalence, on the other hand, is seldom totally achieved. From a theoretical point of view the taxonomic approach too suffers from a number of serious weaknesses. For one thing, there appears to be little agreement on how some types of equivalence should be properly defined. With respect to dynamic/pragmatic equivalence of effect, for instance, it is not clear whether "effect" can be defined and measured at all, let alone how this might be done; nor is it clear whether we can determine the recipients on whom some effect might be measured; or what the relation should be between actual effect and author's intended effect; and so on- there are a host of unsolved problems here.

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More importantly, there does not seem to be any theoretically motivated constraint on the possible number of equivalence types: is the set potentially infinite? Snell-Hornby (1986: 15) claimed to have found as many as 58 types of A.quivalenz mentioned in German studies. If every translation assignment, every source text, is sui generis, and defines its own hierarchy of values-to-bepreserved, is there even any sense in trying to establish a finite set of general equivalence types? Most importantly of all, the proposed taxonomies tend to be both mutually and internally inconsistent with respect to the basic problem of the identity assumption. With some types of equivalence, identity seems impossible: the same effect would ideally require the same recipient in the same situation in the same frame of mind etc.; sameness of collocation would similarly require identical cognitive history and environment; sameness of style would require identical repertoires of styles to draw from etc. Some (such as Jakobson 1959) argue that denotative equivalence is always possible, others deny it. Others again argue that sameness of meaning is not possible but that sameness of situation is - as if meanings existed somehow on their own, isolated from any situation. In fact, to split equivalence into subtypes merely shifts the basic problem of sameness one level down; it does not eliminate the problem. 1.2.3. The Relativist View

' In the light of the above comments it is not surprising that many recent contributions to Translation Theory have tended to reject the identity assumption altogether, and with it the concept of equivalence. For Snell-Hornby (1988), for instance, equivalence is no more than an illusion. What has amounted to a campaign against equivalence has exploited three main lines of argument. The first has been a rejection of "sameness" as a criterion for any relation between source and target, and its replacement by more relative terms such as similarity (e.g. Ross 1981), matching (Holmes 1988) or Wittgenstein's family resemblance (e.g. Toury 1980). The latter term is particularly interesting. Recall that Wittgenstein's point was to demonstrate that exemplars of a given concept such as "game" actually resembled other things called games in many different ways: resemblances are of many kinds. In Translation Theory, where "family resemblance" describes the relation between a source and a target text, the term thus brings the insight that the resemblance in a given case is only one of a number of possible resemblances. Whereas sameness is one, similarities are many. This line of argument is also linked to a particular understanding of the rationality of the translating process. On the sameness view, a translator's

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rationality is what E. Itkonen (1983) has called prescriptive: there is only one rational solution to the translation problem, only one target variant that is truly "equivalent", and the translator's task is to find it. On the similarity view, a translator's rationality is descriptive: there is more than one possible solution, and the translator's task is to find one of them, heuristically the best he or she can think of at the time. (True, there are occasions when only one right variant will do, as in the translation of technical terms; but these are usually word or phraselevel matters only.) This weakening of the demand for sameness has led to the postulation of a relation norm (among other norms) governing professional translation behaviour (Chesterman 1997: 69). This norm is designed to capture the empirical fact of the enormous range of possible relations between source texts and other texts that are claimed to be, and accepted as being, translations of them. The norm is stated in the following way, with no reference to identity or equivalence. The relation norm: a translator should act in such a way that an appropriate relation is established and maintained between the source text and the target text. It is then up to the translator to decide precisely what this appropriate relation should be in each case. To take one extreme example: Georges Perec's extraordinary novel entitled La Disparition ([1969] 1988) does not use the letter "e" at all; the work is a stylistic trick, mirrored in the title itself. This has been translated into English (by Gilbert Adair, 1994) under the title A Void, in a version that similarly dispenses with the letter "e" throughout. The translator's interpretation of the relation norm has thus been: the relation must be such that one particular stylistic trick is preserved, at the expense of all other features if necessary. The title, for instance, is not denotatively equivalent to the original ('The disappearance'), there is an added pun, and the French definite article becomes English indefinite. The translation throughout exploits a stylistic trick that is similar to that of the original. In some respects the trick is "the same", in that both texts can be described in words such as "they do not use 'e"'; but in other respects it is different: the normal distribution of the letter can scarcely be exactly the same in the two languages and so the overall effect is bound to be slightly different. The use of the trick also affects the text as a whole in different ways: for instance, English avoids all definite articles (the) but accepts indefinite singulars (a), but French is even more restrictive, having to avoid definite masculines and plurals (le, les), feminine singulars (une) and indefinite plurals (des), and only accepting indefinite singulars that are masculine (un). The example illustrates the way

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translators first decide on the nature of the relation norm which will be optimally appropriate in a given situation, and then adapt other aspects of the translation process to the constraints imposed by this norm; in this case, one result is an acceptance of considerable differences of meaning, for example. What matters, in other words, is whatever the translator decides is the relevant similarity (or similarities) in this particular case, just as in the traditional sorting task mentioned earlier (p. 10). Pym ( 1992) reminds us that equivalence is fundamentally an economic term, denoting exchange value in a particular situation: "equivalence depends only on what is offered, negotiated and accepted in the exchange situation" (45). In each situation, the parties concerned decide what is of value, what is worth exchanging for what. The second relativist line of debate against equivalence is the argument from cognition, developed most cogently and at some length by Gutt ( 1991 ). It has already been touched on above; in brief, it runs as follows. The interpretation of any utterance is a function of the utterance itself and the cognitive state of the interpreter: we interpret things in the light of what we already know. No two people can ever be in exactly the same cognitive state, for no two people have exactly the same cognitive history. Therefore, no two people can ever interpret a given utterance in exactly the same way. This argument of course holds within a given language too, but it is particularly relevant to translation. Gutt shows, for example, that in translating the Bible it is an illusion to suppose that contemporary recipients can interpret an utterance in the same way as people in another culture several thousand years ago, for their whole cognitive environments, including all kinds of cultural and contextual assumptions, are of course entirely different. To think that one is aiming at equivalence of effect is pure self-delusion. This argument also conclusively rejects any sameness of situation. The third line of argument has come from comparative literary studies and literary translation. Scholars such as Toury ( 1980, 1995) have sought to turn the source-target priorities on their heads, by claiming that Translation Theory should take the target culture as its starting point, not the source culture. After all, it is in the target culture that translations are accepted as translations rather than something else; literary translations enter the target culture polysystem, not that of the source culture. Rather than start from a source text and prescribe in advance some kind of equivalence which a translation of it should fulfil, we should start with existing translations and then examine the various kinds of resemblances/relations which exist between these and their source texts. We could compare several target versions of the same source, for instance, and deduce what the translators' strategies had been, perhaps at different periods of

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history; we could try to establish the various constraints that impinge upon a translator's decision-making (e.g. Lefevere 1992a). Such an approach makes Translation Theory a descriptive endeavour rather than a prescriptive one. Toury (1991, 1995), for instance, is explicit about Translation Studies being an empirical science whose aim is to determine the general laws of translation behaviour: what, under specified temporal, geographical and cultural conditions, are translators observed to do? Other scholars have arrived at a similar overall view by elevating the notion of the translation skopos (aim, purpose) to priority status (cf. e.g. Reiss and Vermeer 1984). They reject the assumption that a translation should automatically seek to achieve the same skopos as the original: what counts in the translation process is not what the original skopos was, but what the skopos of the translation is. It may be very different from that of the original, as when verse is translated as prose, or a novel adapted for a children's version, or a text extract glossed as a linguistic example. Translations have many purposes and are of many kinds. Relativist views of translation equivalence naturally go hand in hand with relativist views of language in general, as opposed to universalist views. I return to this opposition, in connection with the Universal Base hypothesis, in section 1.4.3. In conclusion: most scholars in Translation Theory today tend to reject equivalence as an identity assumption in all its forms (formal, semantic, pragmatic, situational...); they argue that it is theoretically untenable, and also that on empirical grounds it misrepresents what translators actually do. The relation of relevant similarity between source and target text is not given in advance, but takes shape within the mind of the translator under a number of constraints, the most important of which is the purpose of the translated text and the translating act. (For further discussion and some divergent views, see Pym 1995.)

1.3.

Equivalence in Contrastive Analysis

It is sometimes suggested that whereas translation is concerned with communication via texts, i.e. particular instances of language use in particular situations, as parole, the focus of Contrastive Analysis is on differences and similarities between language systems, between grammars, language as langue (e.g. Vehmas-Lehto 1987). However, this difference in viewpoint is becoming increasingly blurred. Both translation theorists and contrastivists have extended

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their focus of attention towards each other, and some scholars have openly sought to establish conceptual bridges between the two disciplines. On the one hand, translation theorists have become interested in establishing principles or rules of translation that would hold more generally than for individual texts: recall Catford's approach cited in the previous chapter, for example; and compare Toury's search for the general laws of translation behaviour, beyond those determined by particular texts. On the other hand, Contrastive Analysis itself has expanded into the area of parole, particularly since the advent of machine-readable corpora. Krzeszowski (1990: 25) actually specifies two major types of contrastive study, one based on lang ue ("systematic" or "projective studies") and the other based on parole ("text-bound studies"). Text-bound studies do not venture generalizations about the underlying grammars that generate texts. Attempts at bridge-building between the two fields often centre on the concept of the norm. Theorists such as Toury (e.g. 1981, 1995) and Coseriu (e.g. 1981) have argued for the centrality of norms, describing an intersubjective level of language midway between competence and performance. Toury proposes that this level of norms should be the main focus of Translation Theory, and Coseriu sees norms as central for both Translation and Contrastive Analysis. Coseriu's definition of the level of norms actually provides a good gloss for the functional approach to be adopted below: the object of linguistic research at this level, he writes (1981: 189), should be the "tibliche traditionelle Realisierung der einzelsprachlichen Funktionen; z.B. fi.ir inhaltliche Funktionen: ihr tibliche Anwendung in der Bezeichnung". For Toury, the norm level of language is the locus of translation competence and what he calls translation potential or translatability; this is defined (1981: 253) as "the capacity of substituting TTs [target texts] for STs [source texts] under certain invariance conditions". For this substitutability to exist, there must be some relevant similarity between source and target. It is the task of Contrastive Analysis to establish the potential similarities, and the task of Translation Theory to explain how and why the translator selects (or has selected) one similar target version rather than another, why one similarity is prioritized over another as being more relevant. In other words (1981: 256): [A]ny "similarity" established in CL [Contrastive Linguistics] is to be rewritten as "translatability under invariance condition x".

This formulation therefore suggests that Contrastive Analysis and Translation Theory are in some respects terminological variants of each other: a "similarity" ' is indeed a kind of "translatability".

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29

Another respect in which in which Contrastive Analysis has refined its conceptual tools beyond pure langue is illustrated by research in contrastive sociolinguistics or pragmatics, which seek to provide analyses that are more delicate than those at the level of an idealized standard language. The interest here is in anchoring contrastive studies more firmly in the different ways languages are used in different situations, by different kinds of people, at different levels of formality, in different registers and genres, and so on. The aim, in short, is to make contrastive studies more sensitive to various aspects of language use. Oleksy (1984), for instance, argued over a decade ago that Contrastive Analysis should move beyond "form-centred theories of language" (such as structuralism) and incorporate "use-centred" theories (such as speech act theory). Contrastive Analysis should thus expand beyond Chomskyan competence to include many aspects of language performance. Indeed, this is exactly what has happened: Contrastive Analysis has moved outwards from syntax to pragmatics, following broader trends in linguistics as a whole. As Oleksy pointed out, this meant that its central concepts suh as congruence and equivalence have needed to be redefined. The current section traces the way in which these concepts have been developed by contrastivists. In so doing, it will also demonstrate the conceptual rapprochement between Contrastive Analysis and Translation Theory. It will thus set the scene for an explication of the methodological approach I will call Contrastive Functional Analysis (hereafter abbreviated to CFA). CFA is defined as a general contrastive methodology, one that is based on semantics in the broadest sense of the term. As a general methodology, it is not tied to any particular grammatical model; I shall, however, use one particular model to demonstrate how the methodology works.

1.3.1. Tertia Comparationis The concept of equivalence in Contrastive Analysis is necessarily linked to that of the tertium comparationis. It has been a commonplace to point out that no comparison can be made between any two entities without a frame of reference provided by a third term of some kind, and that decisions about equivalence are ipso facto decisions about the tertium comparationis. It is also a commonplace to observe that different kinds of analysis require different kinds of third term: this is most obviously the case with respect to the different focuses of phonological studies, lexical studies and syntactic studies. This book does not deal with phonetics or phonology, and I therefore bypass them in what follows. It is instructive to set this initial comparability requirement (i.e. that there must be a tertium comparationis) alongside the foregoing discussions of a "ground" for translation and of the shared features appealed to in similarity

30


judgements. A translator, an assessor of similarity (such as someone looking for an answer to Alice's riddle), and a contrastivist all assume a priori that there is some shared ground, and that their task is to find it. Unlike the other two, however, the contrastivist appears to run the risk of circularity, in that the result of the comparison may be thought to be no more than the initial assumption itself. In Krzeszowski's words (1990: 20): We compare in order to see what is similar and what is different in the compared materials; we can only compare items which are in some respect similar, but we cannot use similarity as an independent criterion in deciding how to match items for comparison since similarity (or difference) is to result from the comparison and not to motivate it. (Emphasis original)

We shall return to this methodological problem below. Contrastive Analysis has made use of various kinds of tertium comparationis (see e.g. James 1980). Phonology aside, these have been based either on form or on meaning. Formal bases include surface structure, syntactic deep structure, and formal operations of various kinds (e.g. a given transformation, rule-ordering and the like). The term "formal correspondence" is often used to describe an identity (or maximal similarity) relation at the formal level. Semantic bases (components of lexemes, speech act type etc.) depend explicitly on translation. However, formal correspondence also involves translation implicitly, in that if there is no semantic relation (broadly understood) between two items there seems little point in investigating their possible formal correspondence, unless as part of a search for abstract formal universals. In contrastive studies, formal relations and semantic relations in fact constrain each other. When looking at form, for instance, we assume a semantic equivalence between grammatical terms: an initial reason why we compare the Finnish passiivi to the English passive is because the two terms seem translations of each other (cf. Shore 1988). On the other hand, when looking at meaning relations as manifested through translation, we have tended to omit data that seem to be "too freely" translated - i.e. which differ too much from the original form, as well as its meaning- in addition to data that have been "wrongly" translated. Krzeszowski has suggested that the primary data for (syntactic) contrastive studies should be "the closest. approximations to grammatical word-for-word translations and their synonymous paraphrases, if such forms exist" (1990: f9). This formulation illustrates the mutual constraints of form and meaning rather well: the data must be translations (a minimum meaning constraint), but they must be translations that are as literal as grammatically possible (the formal constraint). In this way Krzeszowski avoids the circularity mentioned above: if

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31

the initial assumption of similarity is a formal one, the semantic relation of (formally constrained) translation is outside the circle of formal properties. Let us now examine the contrastivists' conceptions of equivalence and tertium comparationis in more detail. A convenient entry-point is the work of Krzeszowski (many of whose major papers and insights appear in revised form in Krzeszowski 1990, to which I shall be referring). Krzeszowski's approach to the concept of equivalence is a taxonomic one, and I shall take each of his types in turn (1990: 23f). Krzeszowski first introduces the useful concept of a "2-text", defined as "any pair of texts, written or oral, in two languages, which are used as data in contrastive studies" (25). One member of a 2-text pair may be a translation of the other; or the pair may be matched only in terms of genre, field, tenor, mode etc. Some contrastive studies are based on a 2-text corpus (the "text-bound studies" referred to above) while1 others ("systematic studies") use 2-texts only to test hypotheses. Krzeszowski' s first type of equivalence is statistical equivalence, which is said to obtain between two selected items which have "maximally similar frequencies of occurrence" (27). In order for two items to be selected as candidates for statistical equivalence there must of course be some reason other than their similar frequencies: the motivation must derive from one of the other kinds of observed equivalence, formal or semantic. Type 2 is translation equivalence. Krzeszowski is careful to point out that this is a broad concept, including all kinds of translation: not only "unacceptable" translations but also versions that deviate from the original in various perfectly acceptable ways, motivated by communicative and pragmatic considerations. Translation equivalence is thus not to be equated with "sameness of meaning" (cf. the previous chapter, and with respect to contrastive studies, also I vir 1983). It would appear that the study of translation equivalence is, in fact, the study of what translators actually do, or what they tend to do or have tended to do. Since translators always work from one language to another, studies based on this type of equivalence are inevitably directional, although Ivir also uses back-translation as a way of constraining his primary data. Marton ([ 1968] 1980), however, goes one step further, proposing that the relation of equivalence only holds between sentences that are mutual translations of each other, and furthermore that these mutual translations must be "optimal" translations in a given context: translation equivalence, after all, is always equivalence-in-context, it is always textual (Vehmas-Lehto 1987). Type 3 is system equivalence. This is a relation that may hold between paradigms which are comparable by virtue of a common grammatical label, such as "pronoun" or "article". We can thus compare the pronoun or article systems in-

32


different languages. Clearly, however, the initial assumption of comparability based on "cognate grammatical terms" is open to amendment: the whole system (the whole category of pronouns, for instance) may actually function differently in the two languages, and the grammatical labels may turn out to be misleading. If you were to study the mood systems of French and Finnish for example, modern Finnish grammatical terminology would lead you to suspect that Finnish konditionaali should be lined up against French conditionnel. However, a hundred years ago the same Finnish mood was known in Finnish grammar as the subjunktiivi, which would naturally suggest a link with French subjonctif. In fact the Finnish mood overlaps semantically with both these French ones (see Helkkula et al. 1987), but the example neatly illustrates the risk of assuming sameness of meaning between grammatical terms in different languages: terms, after all, can change. (On the problems of non-equivalent grammatical terminology, see e.g. van Buren [1970] 1980; Jakobsen and Olsen 1990.) Type 4 is semanto-syntactic equivalence, which may hold between constructions. This is the type on which Krzeszowski bases his own theory of Contrastive Generative Grammar, without doubt the most ambitious contribution to theoretical Contrastive Analysis that has appeared so far. I shall return to this grammar in more detail later, but let us here examine the particular concept of equivalence that underlies it. Semanto-syntactic equivalence is defined as identical deep structure, where deep structure is understood to be semantic, a semantic input structur~ to syntactic derivations (Krzeszowski 1990: 152). This identity assumption is crucial for Krzeszowski's grammar, and he goes to some length to defend it. Problems occur, for instance, when two sentences in language A have demonstrably non-identical deep structures (such as an active and its passive), but both appear to be translatable as the same sentence in language B (see Bouton 1976). It all depends, of course, on what the deep structure is considered to contain- a matter which remains somewhat speculative, since the deep structure is not accessible to observation. Krzeszowski restricts his deep structure to sentence semantics in order to save his identity assumption. Problems also occur in the distinction between semanto-syntactic equivalence and translation equival~:;nce. According to Krzeszowski, "the ability to recognize [semanto-syntactic] equivalents is a part of a bilingual person's competence" (161). This view thus predicates such equivalence on intuition. But suppose bilinguals differ in opinion? How might a claim of semanto-syntactic equivalence be falsified? The problem comes up in the way data are sometimes discussed in the contrastive literature. Both Bouton and Krzeszowski, for instance, take the following Finnish-English pair to be equivalent because they

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33

are the closest approximations to grammatical word-for-word translations (seep. 3 for a key to gloss abbreviations): (x) (y)

Someone broke the window. Ikkuna rikottiin. (window break+PAST+PAS)

However, any English-speaking Finn would disagree. The closest approximation to (x) is not (y) but (z): (z)

Joku rikkoi ikkunan. (someone break+PAST+3SG window+ACC)

This "closer" approximation had evidently not occurred to the two scholars in question, although we can certainly accept (x) as a translation of (y). My point, however, is not to quibble with the data here, but to illustrate that judgements of semanto-syntactic equivalence are just that -judgements, made by someone in a particular situation. And such judgements may vary: recall the discussion of similarity assessment above. The literature on equivalence - particularly on pragmatic equivalence, which we come to in a moment - contains many examples of disagreements about what is a "better equivalent" to what (see e.g. the references under Type 7, below), just as there are disagreements about grammaticality judgements in the general linguistic literature. This of course raises the whole question of the role of intuition in Contrastive Analysis, which I shall return to later. Krzeszowski' s position is that the various semantic relationships between pairs of sentences in two languages form a series of concentric sets. On the outside, we have translation equivalents: sentences in language B that have been judged by a translator to be translationally equivalent to certain sentences in language A. Within this set, there is a subset consisting of translation equivalents that also happen to be the closest approximations to grammatical word-for-word translations. And within this set there is another, consisting of pairs of sentences that have identical semantic inputs: this latter subset is the locus of semantosyntactic equivalence. A translation equivalent of some kind can always be found, indeed more than one; of these, one or another can be claimed to be formally the "closest". Just as there may be disagreements about what constitutes a good (or: the best) translation (cf. Quine 1960), so too there may be disagreements about which of the possible translations is formally the closest approximation. There are disagreements, of course, because "form" is not unitary but complex, so that a

34


pair of sentences may be close with respect to, say, word-class categories but not close with respect to constituent order, or theme-rheme structure, or morpheme boundaries, or whatever. The degree of overall closeness is a matter of weighing the various formal components against each other, in other words it is precisely a matter of judgement. But a sentence in language A may not necessarily have a semanto-syntactic equivalent in language B: there may be semanto-syntactic gaps. Semantosyntactic equivalence is thus rather heavily constrained. It is defined theoryinternally: if two sentences can be given an identical semantic input by the grammar, they are by definition semanto-syntactically equivalent. And conversely: if they are thus equivalent, they must have identical semantic inputs. Equivalence type 5 is rule equivalence. Krzeszowski's frame of reference here is a transformational-generative one, and "rules" are rules of phrase structure formation, of transformation. Sentences in different languages may, in their process of generation, undergo the same formal rules, in which case we have rule equivalence. The actual kinds of rules will depend on the model of grammar being used. An important concept here is that of congruence (cf. Marton 1968). Two transformation rules are said to be identical if they operate on congruent structures and result in congruent transforms. Congruent structures are those that underlie congruent sentences. And congruent sentences are those which are (a) semanto-syntactically equivalent and (b) consist of the same number of lexical items of the same word-class, with the same syntactic function, in the same order (Krzeszowski 1990: 135). Congruent structures thus have identical formatives in an identical linear order. Function words, grammatical morphemes, even auxiliaries, are disregarded. Marton also proposes a technical distinction between "identical" and "similar" along these lines: for two transformations to be similar only, the base strings must be congruent but the resulting transforms need not be. Rule equivalence has been useful as a way of measuring the degree of similarity between two sentences (see also Di Pietro 1971; James 1980): more similar structures remain congruent through more phases of the generation process than less congruent ones, which diverge earlier. Type 6 is substantive equivalence. It is based on extra-linguistic substance, either acoustic I articulatory I auditory for phonological studies, or semantic I situational/ external reality for lexical studies. In the latter case, Krzeszowski stresses that it is not the external reality as such but rather "its psychic image in the minds of language users" (29). Recall Catford's appeal to shared features of "situational substance", mentioned above. In this context it is worth mentioning that the idea of shared features has been interestingly debated in the contrastive literature. Kalisz (1981) proposed

CONTRASTIVE

~hat

35

equivalence be recognized as intrinsically relative, a matter of degree, and that it should be defined as a partial matching of properties (properties being syntactic, lexical, pragmatic etc. features). The greater the match, i.e. the overlap, the more equivalence. This proposal derives from prototype theory, and I shall come back to it below. Krzeszowski (1990: 220), however, rightly points out that degree of matching is not actually a matter of the number of overlapping features but of their relative salience (he speaks of "the status attributed to various properties": some properties are more privileged than others). Recall again the earlier discussion of similarity judgement. Degrees of substantive equivalence obviously imply a scalar concept, a point recognized by many contrastivists. In her work on contrastive lexis, for instance, Snell-Hornby (1983) uses a scale ranging from total equivalence (e.g. technical terms with consistent back-translations), through working equivalence (acceptable as translations, in context) and partial coverage (some features match, others clearly do not; translations may need to be expanded), to nil-coverage (e.g. culture-specific concepts). She speaks of total equivalence between lexemes as an "illusion" - compare the denial of the possibility of complete synonyms within a language- and sees partial coverage and non-equivalence as "a reality in interlingual comparison" (247). Type 7 is pragmatic equivalence. This is the basis for contrastive stylistics and sociolinguistics; others use the term functional equivalence. Krzeszowski' s definition is this: pragmatic equivalence is a relation that holds between two texts in different languages such that "they evoke maximally similar cognitive reactions in the users of these texts" (30). Unlike all the other kinds of equivalence here mentioned, pragmatic equivalence is the only one that is explicitly said to pertain to texts. Pragmatic equivalence has been variously understood and much debated in the literature. Riley (1979) proposed that "contrastive pragmalinguistics" should take account of both illocutionary structure and interactive structure. Implictly, his approach thus assumed equivalence at the level of the speech act (illocutionary) and at the level of interactional tactics such as exchanges and moves. Faerch and Kasper (1984) take the general interactional tactic of maintaining and regulating discourse to be the tertium comparationis in their study of conversational gambits in German and Danish, but feel rather uncomfortable about the language-neutral status of their formulation. They point to the lack of an adequate frame of reference for comprehensive discourse analysis. Oleksy (1983, 1984, 1986) explores speech act equivalence in some detail: he suggests that an expression in language A is pragmatically equivalent to one in language B if both can be used to perform the same speech act under corresponding circumstances (i.e. with the same values for parameters such as

36


sex, age, formality level, etc.). Janicki (1985) finds such definitions unsatisfactory, partly because almost any linguistic expression can be used to function as almost any speech act, and also because there is no guarantee that any two people will interpret a given speech act in the same way. He also draws attention to the circularity problem: pragmatic equivalence cannot be both the motivation for analysis and the result of analysis. What we need, rather (Janicki 1986), is a series of tertia comparationis defined in terms of an inventory of categories of user (age, education, occupation etc.) and use (topic, setting, channel). Kalisz (1986: 1250), on the other hand, suggests that utterances are pragmatically equivalent "if and only if they exhibit maximally similar implicatures", whether conversational or conventional. Krzeszowski (1990: 218222) prefers a criterion of maximal similarity of anticipated perlocutionary effect. Wierzbicka (1991) doubts the value of looking for purely pragmatic constants. In particular, she is critical of the view that speech acts (or even pragmatic maxims such as those proposed by Grice (1975) or Brown and Levinson (1988)) can be taken as constants across cultures. She argues that such a view is merely "misguided universalism" (69), and brings together a great deal of evidence in support of a very different approach. This assumes that people speak in profoundly different ways in different cultures, and that these differences reflect quite different values or value-hierarchies. The level at which constants must be sought is thus not that of speech acts but that of independently established cultural values which can be expressed in simple semantic terms. In one sense, the tertium comparationis thus becomes increasingly abstract, but in another it becomes more accessible, since woolly pragmatics is reduced to more definable semantics. Wierzbicka' s proposal is that the universal building bricks of language, thought of by Leibniz as the innate natural language of human thought, can be formulated in terms of a small number of fundamental universal concepts, semantic primitives. These concepts must be expressible in simple everyday language. In her 1980 book she proposed a set of thirteen such primitives, but her 1991 book uses more: 27. By combining these primitives in various ways, she is able to specify a large number of very subtle distinctions between speech acts, different particles, and the like. Her formulations of contrasts are lexically very simple, because her "radical semantics" aims to use concepts that are immediately comprehensible in any language, easily translatable; but in complex combinations the formulations become formidably clumsy, extending for many clauses. What is gained on the swings tends to be lost on the roundabouts. If the aim is a universal semantic deep structure consisting of a small finite set of primitives, the problem is: how deep to go? Presumably, at the very deepest level there would be a single primitive perhaps corresponding to something like the total universal meaning of the first

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37

sound a human being utters upon entering the world? Wierzbicka has elected to work at a slightly higher level than this, and seems to be moving further towards the surface as the number of her primitives grows. The level at which one operates of course depends on what one wishes to say. In my view, Wierzbicka has certainly shown that the level of speech act is not deep enough, and that many pragmatic phenomena can be formulated in semantic terms. The arguments about pragmatic equivalence have highlighted two of the conclusions drawn by Oleksy (1986: 1416) concerning equivalence in Contrastive Analysis in general. (a) It is becoming more and more evident that equivalence as a whole is a relative concept, so that references to "identity" increasingly give way to the notion of "maximum similarity". Moreover, it is becoming increasingly obvious that judgements about how similarity is to be measured, and about what constitutes maximum similarity, vary across assessors; so that maximum similarity is relative to those judging it. Further, formulations of equivalence or similarity are also relative to the particular theoretical framework in which they are made. In the light of the arguments outlined above, none of this should be surprising. (b) As Contrastive Analysis spreads out into pragmatics its definitions of equivalence have become less rigorous, again because of the very nature of its framework theories. (It is precisely this tendency that Wierzbicka seeks to counter.) Krzeszowski's set of equivalence types actually serves as a useful guide to the way Contrastive Analysis has developed over time. The early (non-phonological) studies were structural, based on system equivalence and a kind of construction equivalence, plus translation equivalence. The era of transformational grammar brought an interest in rule equivalence, while generative semantics and case grammar focused more on the substantial equivalence furnished by semantic universals of various kinds (see especially Di Pietro 1971). And more recent research has then branched out into pragmatic issues. 1.3.2. Bilingual Competence and Translation Competence

It will by this time have become clear that there is a striking resemblance between the kinds of equivalence listed by Krzeszowski above and those commonly recognized in Translation Theory. Let us now look at the relation between these two fields more closely. We can start by lining up the types we have· been discussing in each, as indicated in Table 1. To a large extent, it seems, the two fields are talking about the same phenomena in different words. Of particular interest is the fact that all types of equivalence used by contrastivists, with the possible exception of rule equivalence, make some appeal to translation as a way of establishing and

38


constraining the primary data. Quantitative contrastive studies can use data that is not thus constrained, with texts matched only for genre etc.: this is the basic approach of contrastive rhetoric, as we shall see in a later chapter. But we contrast systems partly on the basis of the assumed translatability of their elements or of the categories describing their elements; and the other types in the contrastive list involve translation quite transparently. Table 1. General types of equivalence. Contrastive Analysis

Translation Theory

Statistical Translation System Semanto-syntactic

Connotative, stylistic Translation, textual Formal Formal plus denotative

Rule

(?)

Substantial (lexical) Pragmatic, functional

Semantic, denotative Dynamic, functional, text-type normative

What, then, is the real difference between the two? Let us pick up a point made at the beginning of this chapter, concerning the fuzzy relation between langue and parole, competence and performance. As I mentioned, contrastivists often shrug off translation matters as performance phenomena. Here is Krzeszowski, for instance (1990: 161): "The ability to recognize (semantosyntactic] equivalents is a part of a bilingual person's competence, while ability to translate is a part of translation performance." I think this view is confusing. In the first place, "ability to translate" must be part of a competence of some kind, not part of performance. Putting an ability into practice, using an ability, is performance; not the ability itself. Ability to translate is translation competence. Both bilingual competence and translation competence are of course matters of degree, not absolute states. In this respect both are different from nativespeaker competence, which is normally thought of as being either present or not, partly no doubt as a result of the idealized homogeneous speech community bequeathed by structuralism and generative grammar. Native-speaker judgements about grammaticality are therefore not on a par with judgements of equivalence made by bilinguals or translators, for the nature of their intuitions is different. In the latter case, a much wider range of disagreement is naturally to be expected. Further, it is well known that not all bilinguals are good translators; and also that not all good translators need to be maximally bilingual, for the mastctry

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39

of the target language is more important than an active mastery of the source language. Translation competence is thus not the same thing as bilingual competence, although there is of course an overlap between the two. We might say that bilingual competence is the ability to function linguistically in two cultures, while translation competence is the ability to mediate linguistically between two cultures. Bilinguals perform by functioning in their two languages, and translators perform by translating. Instances of such performance are thus (a) utterances and interpretations in two languages, and (b) translations. On this view, estimations of any kind of equivalence that involves meaning must be based on translation competence, precisely because such estimations require the ability to move between utterances in different languages. Translation competence, after all, involves the ability to relate two things. Translation competence also includes the ability to compare different translations. Pym (1992: 175) specifies this exactly: he suggests that translation competence is (a) the ability to generate a series of possible target versions for a given source item or text, plus (b) the ability to select from this series the most appropriate one in a given situation (which, he says, can be proposed "to a particular reader as an equivalent" of the source). The given situation might stipulate, for example, that the selected version must be formally as close to the source as grammatically possible. It might even stipulate that grarnmaticality can be over-ridden if necessary, as in linguistic glosses used in books like this one. Judging whether a sentence is semanto-syntactically equivalent or not - or selecting one that is, if such is required - is thus no more than one normal way of using normal translation competence. It follows that a sharp dividing line between Translation Theory and Contrastive Analysis is not well motivated, in that both fields are studying data which rely on translation competence: translations, or judgements about translations. After all, when a contrastive linguist discusses data in two languages, the examples are almost always presented implicitly as translations, albeit often context-free ones: we compare I have been waiting for two hours with J'attends depuis deux heures precisely because we can offer one as a possible translation of the other. As argued by Krzeszowski, the data for Contrastive Analysis are indeed mostly subsets of possible translations. In this respect one might even see Contrastive Analysis as a form of translation criticism: it investigates and evaluates differences between possible translations, under precise formal constraints. Both fields are interested in seeing how "the same thing" can be said in other ways, although each field uses this information for different ends. Indeed, in informal terms, "seeing how 'the same thing' can be said in other ways" captures the essence of Contrastive Functional Analysis very well.

40


This kind of analysis builds on many of the conclusions that we have so far drawn. As we shaH see, it is based on a notion of similarity rather than one of identity; it explicitly relies on translation competence; it covers all the kinds of equivalence listed above except that of rule equivalence - in other words, all those which can or must involve translation; and it aims at psychological realism, as I shall argue below. Contrastive Functional Analysis (CFA) aims to be compatible with psycholinguistic research, because another consequence of the position sketched out above is that the final court of appeal in both fields lies within the human mind, the locus of any competence. As judgements of similarity depend on perception, so judgements of appropriate translations depend on the assessor's understanding of the translation situation, and judgements of equivalence depend ultimately on intuition. Insofar as equivalence, as we have seen, is a theoryinternal matter (determined by how it is defined in the theory), it also depends on the mind of the linguist who creates or uses the theory. Postwar Contrastive Analysis was interested in the mind of the languagelearner. From Fries (1945) and Lado (1957) onwards, much research was motivated by the belief that information about differences and similarities between languages could be applied directly to language teaching (for historical surveys, see Rusiecki 1976; James 1980; Fisiak 1983). Predictions of learning difficulty based on such research, however, were often unsuccessful, and &fter Alatis ( 1968) Error Analysis arose to pick up the psychological challenge. More recently, however, Contrastive Analysis itself has returned to the task of trying to probe into the language-user's mind. As well as moving outwards into pragmatics, taking more account of the mind as a social construct, it has also been moving inwards, partly in response to advances in cognitive linguistics. The following section takes up the topic of this inward movement, which has also been of theoretical significance to the general position taken by CF A.

1.4.

On Psychological Realism

Some contrastivists, such as Fisiak (e.g. in his introduction to Fisiak 1980), draw a distinction between theoretical and applied contrastive studies. Theoretical studies are said to be non-directional, starting from some shared or presumably universal property and looking at its manifestations in two languages. Theoretical studies are thus akin to work in language typology and are relevant to the concept of universal grammar. Applied studies, on the other hand, are directional: they start from a property or expression in one language and investigate its manifestation in another. Applied studies in this sense have been assumed to be

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relevant to language learning and teaching. Other scholars, such as Krzeszowski (e.g. 1990), have queried this way of drawing a distinction between pedagogical and pure contrastive studies: on this view, which I share, both directional and adirectional studies may be of both pedagogical and theoretical relevance, as this book indeed seeks to demonstrate. 1.4.1. The Problem of the Psycholinguistic Fallacy

The origins of the theoretical/applied distinction lie in the postwar developments of Contrastive Analysis, which were strongly motivated by the need to improve language-teaching methods and materials. In other words, contrastive studies were trusted to be psychologically real, for what scholars were really interested in was the language-learner's mind. The results of contrastive studies, when applied in teaching, should be somehow reflected in the cognitive processes of language learners. The well-known classical assumption, of course, was that linguistic difference correlated directly with learning difficulty. Empirical research in the 1960s and 1970s undermined this assumption. Hypotheses about learner behaviour, predicted according to contrastive findings, were by no means always well supported. It appeared that Contrastive Analysis, like some other schools of linguistics, had succumbed to the psycholinguistic fallacy (Chesterman 1980). That is, it had non-validly equated its descriptions of linguistic objects (structures, grammars, rules etc.) with descriptions of mental states, capacities or processes. Popper's concept of the three Worlds elucidates this fallacy well. Popper (e.g. 1972) distinguished between the world of physical, material objects (World 1), the world of subjective mental states and processes (World 2), and the world of objective knowledge, theories, arguments etc. (World 3). Grammars constructed by linguists are entities of World 3, not World 2. One manifestation of this fallacy can be illustrated by means of the difference between static and dynamic views of language (see e.g. Sajavaara 1984). A contrastivist looks at a language as a whole, synoptically, from a bird's eye position as it were; the language is a static unit, entirely "present" at one time. Contrastive descriptions are typically based on this view; they look at systems, sets of structures or rules, as a whole, as static blocks. But a language learner does not see the target language in this way. A learner approaches the target language dynamically, bit by bit, seeing successions of partial systems, partial sets of structures etc., which gradually become more complete over time. The actual structures themselves are of course "static", but the learner's exposure to them and acquisition of them is processual, piecemeal. The learner's overall

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picture of the whole, moreover, may never materialize in the same way that it does to the contrastive linguist. The solution proposed by Sajavaara and others is that contrastivists should abandon a static view and seek to focus on actual processing differences between speakers and learners of different languages. We should look at differences in the perception process, for instance, or in how different speakers actually use their various languages. We should move towards contrastive interaction analysis, looking at both speaker performance and hearer performance. We should seek to take account of all the features that affect linguistic perfomance: situational ones, emotional and attitudinal ones, cognitive ones, personality ones, those bound to teaching method or textbook, level of proficiency, and so on. Ktihlwein (1984), for example, argues explicitly for a psycholinguistic perspective, originating from a conceptual basis, an "underlying universal conceptual grid" (325), and incorporating the whole range of perceptual and conceptual strategies. In this way, we could maintain an acceptable level of psychological realism. For after all, only psychologically real phenomena can be transferred. Which brings us to the crucial concept of interference, otherwise known as negative transfer. Pedagogically oriented Contrastive Analysis is of course founded on this very concept, on the belief that native-language structures etc. tend to be transferred in foreign-language performance, and thus produce errors or deviant usage of various kinds. Pedagogical Contrastive Analysis is thus predicated upon psychological realism by virtue of its key concept of interference. One of the classical statements of this point occurs in Weinreich' s discussion of interference. His definition runs as follows ([1953] 1974: 1): Those instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one language, i.e. as a result of language contact, will be referred to as INTERFERENCE phenomena.

The locus of language contact is bilingual individuals. (Weinreich's concept of bilingualism is very broad, encompassing any degree of competence in more than one language, dialect, or even variety of the same dialect.) Interference is said to be the result of a bilingual's tendency towards "interlingual identification". This is understood as the merging, in the bilingual's mind, of two distinct entities because of a perceived resemblance between them: aspirated /p/ in one language may be merged with (identified with) unaspirated /p/ in another, by virtue of their shared articulatory features (+bilabial, -voiced). It is the physical resemblance between these two sounds that "tempts the bilingual to identify the two" (7). Interlingual identification may occur on any level of language (sound,

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form, content, use ... ), and the perceived similarity that prompts the merging may be of any kind. In each case, what happens is a "classificatory overlapping" in which distinct entities are deemed not to be distinct after all. For the bilingual, this merging of linguistic systems is motivated on laboursaving grounds: it leads to a reduction of the linguistic burden and makes processing easier. On the other hand, there is a price to pay: too much interference will obviously hamper communication simply because the language produced (or the interpretation arrived at) will be too deviant. From the point of view of communicative efficacy, we have a typical cost-benefit ratio. Weinreich is at pains to stress that a contrastive linguistic analysis can only reveal areas of potential interference; there are many other (non-linguistic) factors that determine whether or not such interference will actually be realized in practice. Interference thus takes place in the mind of the bilingual. Contrastive Analysis therefore has a natural interest in models of grammar which explicitly seek psychological realism, models which at least seek to be compatible with what is known about how the brain works. Models of this kind have been proposed in cognitive linguistics, and there have been some interesting applications in contrastive studies. One was mentioned above: the suggestion (Kalisz 1981) that equivalence could be defined in terms of prototype theory, as partial pattern matching or overlap between natural categories. A rejection of classical Aristotelian categories demotes such notions as identity or sameness, and promotes others such as family res.emblance or similarity; fuzzy boundaries are seen as normal. A pioneering study by Krzeszowski ( 1986, 1990) showed how this approach can shed light on the complex relation between the semantic fields covered by the English preposition over and the relevant data in Polish. Krzeszowski concludes that prototype theory provides a useful tool for assessing degrees of similarity. In theory, at the most similar end of the scale we have "complete pattern matching of semantic and/or syntactic properties". Concerning the other end of the scale Krzeszowski concludes (1990: 230-1): The lower bound of the scale is not delimited by the matching patterns themselves since there is no a priori way of deciding on the necessary minimum of similarity required for the recognition of two linguistic forms as matching. Therefore, the lower bound of the scale is delimited cognitively through the bilingual informant's recognition of two linguistic forms in two languages as being in one category within the domain of contrastive studies. Thus, the decision is made not on the basis of the inherent properties of the

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compared categories but on the basis of what Lakoff calls "background framing" ...

I would add that "background framing" surely plays a role at all points on the similarity scale, not just at the lower bound. We arrive again at the conclusion that judgements of similarity depend on perception, on cognition.

1.4.2. Interference and Re-entry Let us now approach the matter from another angle, from the brain itsetf. If we wish to claim that our contrastive analyses do ·indeed have psychological relevance, it behoves us to ensure that they are at least compatible with what is known about the workings of the human brain. True, much that is mental remains inaccessible, in the infamous black box; but contrastivists with cognitivist aspirations cannot afford simply to neglect the results of neurological research, for instance. In the interests of bridging the gap between these two approaches, let us now make a brief excursion into neurology. I shall attempt to sketch one particular theory which seems to me to be of the utmost relevance to linguistics in general, and especially to Contrastive Analysis. My aim is to show what the neurological correlate might be for linguistic similarity, and hence to suggest how the brain might actually go about making judgements of similarity and what might actually happen during interference. My source of inspiration is the work of Gerald Edelman, and particularly his book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992). This is a non-technical summary of his trilogy Neural Darwinism, Topobiology and The Remembered Present. The general thrust of Edelman' s w9rk is to put the mind back into the body, to demonstrate that theories about consciousness, memory, learning, language etc. must be compatible with the biological facts if they seek to be more than formalist games. The mind cannot be understood in the absence of biology. Edelman argues that neurology is a "recognition science". That is, it studies the way an organism adaptively matches elements in one domain to elements in another domain (1992: 74f). The crucial point is that this matching takes place without prior instruction: there is no innate structure which governs the matching process, which works by selection. This is how evolution works. Edelman illustrates with an example from immunology (in which he was awarded a Nobel prize in 1972). If a foreign molecule enters an organism, what happens roughly speaking is that the host organism selects from its antibodies the ones which fit the shape of the foreign molecule most closely, and reproduces precisely these antibodies (as clones) in large numbers, which are then available to counter any future foreign molecules of the same shape. The incoming molecule does not

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"instruct" the immune system how to make the appropriate antibodies; rather, the system itself selects those of its already existing antibodies which match most closely, and multiplies these. The point of interest here is this: what the organism recognizes is similarity. Each immune cell makes an antibody with a slightly different shape; antibody molecules have a "constant region" which binds them to the cell, plus a "variable region" which adjusts itself to the foreign molecule, like an adjustable spanner. The matching is not total; it is not a matter of identity. In Edelman's words, the foreign molecule "is bound by just those antibodies on the cells of the immune system that happen to fit parts of its shape" (76). The matching is one of partial overlap, partial fit. Elsewhere he says that the foreign molecule binds to antibody shapes that "happen to be more or less complementary to it" (77). Edelman argues that the brain is another example of a recognition system. His theory of how the brain carries out this recognition is called the theory of neuronal group selection (83f). The theory has three main tenets. (1) Developmental selection: competitive cell movements, divisions and deaths in a population of neurons lead to a "primary repertoire", an initial set of neural networks in a particular region of the brain. This repertoire is not specified in advance by the genetic code, which only imposes certain constraints. Even genetically identical individuals are most unlikely to have identical networks, because selection is not genetic but epigenetic, and no two individuals have the same experience of the environment. (Recall the argument against equivalenceas-identity: no two speakers will interpret an utterance in exactly the same way, because they will have different cognitive histories.) (2) Experiential selection, during which populations of synapses are strengthened or weakened as a result of behaviour. This "carves out" certain circuits from the primary repertoire, and these constitute the secondary repertoire. These strengthened circuits form the basis of memory, for instance. (3) Re-entry. This third tenet is the crucial one, and the most complex. The term denotes a process of repeated signalling between the neural maps that have been formed by the primary and secondary repertoires. These maps are interconnected many times over, and re-entrant signalling takes place along the connections: successions of signals "re-enter" time and time again, constantly causing slight adjustments in the relative strength patterns of the synaptic network. When a particular group of neurons is activated, other groups in different but connected maps may thus be activated at the same time. Re-entrant signalling then correlates the activated synapses, so that the two maps begin to have similar patterns of synapses. This is how two independent inputs become correlated. Input A activates neuronal map A, and input B activates neuronal map B; re-entrant signalling between the two maps then strengthens the connections in

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each map which have similar co-ordinates. The result is an association betwe~n the two patterns of responses, what Edelman calls a "classification couple". This process is the basis for perceptual categorization, and presumably for other types of categorization as well. Edelman stresses that perceptual categorization cannot occur in terms of classical categories, because it is based on the "disjunctive sampling of properties" (87). Categorization decisions derive from "the statistics of signal correlations" (90), not from a computerlike, algorithmic instruction. They result from the selection of neuronal groups that behave in an appropriate way. Appropriateness, in turn, is defined with reference to "internal criteria of value" (90). These values are set by evolutionary selection (having to do with survival, warmth, food, light etc.). The concept of re-entry has been compared to the communication between players in an orchestra, whose individual performances respond all the time to those of the other players. Consider the tuning-up process, for instance, in which various pitches gradually approximate as closely as possible to the note A. The players respond individually to the input provided initially by the oboe, but also refine their own tuning (and, especially, their subsequent playing) in continuing response to what they hear each other producing: this response is like re-entry signalling. Edelman' s concept of re-entry seems to me to be precisely the neurological correlate of interference, in which two inputs are treated as one: the response patterns in the two neuronal groups are initially interconnected, and this correlation is reinforced by re-entry, so that after a given time the two maps become more similar. Edelman' s theory has a number of serious consequences for linguistics, some of which he draws attention to himself. If this is the way the brain works, the brain is not like a computer. Nor is it like the network models proposed by the connectionists, because it learns by selection, not instruction. Edelman elsewhere compares the brain to a rainforest, teeming with variety, fuzzy-edged, organic, full of populations adapting for survival, interacting with itself and with what is outside it. Agreeing with Putnam, he insists (224) that: The brain and the nervous system cannot be considered in isolation from states of the world and social interactions. But such states, both environmental and social, are indeterminate and open-ended. They cannot be simply identified by any software description. ' Axiomatic models of language structure that work with algorithms cannot expect , to be psychologically real; formal attempts to "generate" sentences tell us nothing

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about the mind, or how language is acquired. Edelman is critical of the formalist Chomskyan approach for this reason, and sees his own research as providing support for the views of Lakoff, Langacker and others in cognitive grammar, and of Rosch at el. in prototype theory. The categories which the brain makes tend to be fuzzy, not Aristotelian (classical, clear-cut). Being a product of man's interaction with the environment and other people, language cannot be welldefined. (Keenan ( 1978) has argued that the fuzziness of language is in fact functional, because human beings themselves are "by nature imprecise"; language would be a much less efficient instrument of communication if it were well defined.) Further, there is no language acquisition device sitting ready in the head. Meaning itself is interactional, being determined partly by the environment and partly by a given speech community, and partly by the very body of the speaker. Language, like the mind, is "embodied". Incidentally, Edelman's delight in the fuzzy, open-ended variability of language and the idea of the human mind as a rainforest has obvious implications (which he discusses) for creativity, freedom and morality. It is paradoxical that Chomsky can derive similar ideas about creativity, freedom and morality from an apparently diametrically opposed view of the human mind. Edelman would surely call Chomsky's view mechanistic- consider the following comments by Chomsky in a recently published interview (Reime 1994: 52): Interviewer: You have said in your recent writings that in a way language is unusable or at least not very functional. On the other hand, you have stressed that [the] language faculty is a kind of mental organ. Is there some kind of, not inconsistency or contradiction, but some kind of tension between these two views? Chomsky: No. I think most organs are non-functional in the same sense. That was meant to be deliberately provocative. When I say that it's not functional or not usable, I don't mean you can't use it. It just means that it's not well-designed for use. But in that respect it's like most organs ... Take one [... ] that happened to strike me recently, namely the spine. The spine is very poorly designed, and apparently this poor design goes all the way back to the origins of vertibrate history. We live, but if an engineer was designing a vertibrate, he would not do it this way. So in that sense it's not functional. Linguist-as-biologist vs. linguist-as-engineer ... Interestingly, Giv6n (1993) uses a similar metaphorical contrast: he suggests that functionalists see language as a biological organism governed by communicatively motivated behavioural laws, rather than as a logic machine governed by Newtonian laws.

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For Contrastive Analysis, conclusions can be drawn from Edelman's theory which support the earlier discussion about similarity. In nature, and in the brain, variety is all. No two individuals have the same experience of the , ; environment, none are neurologically wired in the same way, no two stimuli are perceived as identical. What I have earlier referred to as the identity assumption, therefore, turns out to be extremely unlikely at the neurological level at least. In this sense, to make the identity concept the basis of a contrastive theory would be a step away from psychological realism. On the other hand, family resemblances and prototypes are highly relevant notions. However, similarities can be perceived in many ways that are not accessible to a logical, hierarchical description, and may be perceived quite differently by different people. Categorization (which involves perception of similarity) is based on value, on values recognized as being salient at a given moment. Contrastive Functional Analysis embodies an approach to the analysis of language pairs (or sets) which at least seeks to be compatible with the views sketched above. Such an approach aims to develop a model that is psychologically at least plausible. This is exactly the goal of "psychological adequacy" set by Dik (1989: 13). Yet grammatical models used in CFA remain World 3 entitities, products of human minds; they do not describe World 2 states and processes directly.

1.4.3. Universalist vs. Relativist It is paradoxical that modern contrastive studies really took off during the postwar structuralist period in linguistics, when the dominant belief was that each language was sui generis; this belief naturally made the formulation of a shared tertium comparationis somewhat problematic. Among linguists of an anthropological bent, linguistic relativity was widely assumed, either in a weak form (different languages influence cognition differently) or a strong one (language determines cognition). The Universal Base hypothesis - that all human languages share a universal deep structure - runs counter to these Whorfian views. It lies at the heart of post-structuralist linguistics, and has also inspired much theoretical and practical research in language acquisition. (See e.g. Beretta 1993, plus the other papers in that special issue of Applied Linguistics; and see also Pinker 1994, for a defensive state-of-the-art survey.) Among supporters of the Universal Base hypothesis there are differences of opinion about the level of this base and its constitution: for some, it is formal; for others, semantic; for yet others, cognitive.

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To the contrastivist today, the debate between the relativists and the universalists seems unduly binary. The impression is often given that one must either take the view that at some level all languages are "the same", or else the view that all languages are in all respects "not the same". This opposition is often linked to different theories of meaning. Universalists are then associated with a belief in objective meanings, meanings as entities "out there"; and relativists are associated with a belief in negotiated meanings, meanings as results of negotiation among speakers of a particular language. However, human cultures are neither all the same nor totally different. Translation between different languages is possible, precisely because there are (and insofar as there are) similarities in the ways different cultures and languages conceive of the universe. It is because of these overlaps that cross-cultural communication is possible, that we can have any understanding of a language and culture other than our own. Quine's famous example (1960) of the linguist wondering what some native expression "gavagai" means is thus misleading. Since it is uttered when the native informant sees a rabbit, the default inference the linguist can make is that its meaning has something to do with a rabbit. Precisely what it means is not clear, agreed: a rabbit, a rabbit running, a potential lunch, a part of a rabbit, or what? But it will probably have something to do with a rabbit. (True, the connection might only be as tenuous as "Look!" or "Give me my gun" ... ) Quine focuses on the impossibility of an outsider knowing exactly what the impression means; but we may also note what an outsider can reasonably infer. It is here that the overlap exists, between the outsider linguist's understanding of the world and that of the native speaker in question. We can return to our earlier discussion of similarity. Between the Weltanshauungs of the native and the linguist there exist similarities, simply by virtue of the fact that they live on the same planet and are both human beings. Similarities, after all, are partly dependent on features of the objects deemed similar. And similarities are relative, in that entities can be more or less similar. In time, we might guess that Quine's linguist would become more familiar with the native culture, hear "gavagai" uttered under various conditions, and thus gradually arrive at a more precise understanding of its meaning, just as children gradually refine their earlier understandings of the meanings of words in their mother tongue. The fact that he might never arrive at a conception of the meaning that was exactly the same as the native's is immaterial. It would be equally true to say that this particular native's conception is unlikely to be exactly the same as that of any other native speaker of the language, even, given that no two people have the same cognitive environment or experience (as argued earlier). Neurologically, too, no two individuals have identical networks.

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I therefore take the view that to talk of "sameness", or an "identical" universal base, is misleading. For Contrastive Analysis to make any sense at all, there must be a belief in some kind of overlap between the different ways speakers of different languages tend to speak. We need to commit ourselves neither to an identical universal base nor to unsurmountable difference. Pinker (1994), making a strong case for Universal Grammar, concludes with the dramatic assertion that "we all have the same minds" (430), albeit not of course in the sense of neurological identity. He takes this shared mental capacity as indicating the existence of innate (i.e. genetically inherited) formal universals underlying the grammars of all human languages. Of particular relevance here, however, is Pinker's appeal to the notion of similarity and to the perception of similarity (others would speak of analogy: see especially E. Itkonen 1991) as the foundation of all learning. He argues that the notion of similarity must be innate, that it is "in the mind of the beholder" (416) quite literally, from birth or even before. He then suggests that this innate "similarity space", insofar as it is applied to first-language learning, is defined and constrained by Universal Grammar. On this view, Universal Grammar is in fact none other than a set of similarity constraints, a notion we shall return to shortly. These constraints determine which utterances the child will construe as being "similar" to which other ones, and hence use as bases for generalizations. As we prepare the groundwork for a general methodology of CFA, we do not need to make any strong claims about cognition or Universal Grammar, but our general conceptual framework, based on the notion of similarity, ·Seems strikingly in accord with Pinker's arguments from cognitive psychology. Recall now my own earlier discussion of similarity, and in particular the fact that degree of similarity correlates inversely with extension of similarity. The linguistic notion that captures this relation is that of delicacy. This has perhaps been used most explicitly by Halliday, but it is also highly relevant for Contrastive Analysis. Delicacy is usually defined in linguistic terms as "level or amount of detail"; it typically characterizes the level of detail of taxonomies, how many subclasses are indicated, how far a hierarchy extends. With respect to Contrastive Analysis, it captures the dimension of degree of similarity. With a very delicate analysis, degree of similarity can be specified in such detail that the range of items actually judged to be similar ends up being very small indeed, perhaps even zero. This often tends to be the case when the degree of similarity is specified to be "identity", for instance in non-fuzzy algorithmic generative models. One of the particular characteristics of CFA is that it operates at a different level of delicacy. By placing less strict demands on the relevant degree of similarity, it can include a wider range of items in a given comparison, and then focus on their different conditions of use. The decision to operate at this less

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constrained level of similarity is thus a heuristic one, determined by the aims of a given analysis. Too much delicacy would mean very limited paradigms; too little delicacy would mean too broad and undifferentiated paradigms. The theoretical aim is an optimum level of delicacy between these two extremes, which allows the specification of paradigms that are conceptually realistic. A key concept here is that of the similarity constraint, which I introduce in the following section. The semantic structure posited in CFA (to be described in chapter 2, below) defines the overlap between two (or more) languages at a given level of delicacy. At a "deeper" and more abstract level, for instance, we might propose analyses in terms of a very small set of semantic primitives as suggested by Wierzbicka (1991), or in terms of cognitive or phenomenological categories as suggested by Preston (1980), or the needs and the affective and cognitive states of the speaker (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 1983). At a less abstract level, on the other hand, where the similarity constraint would be defined less stringently, we might investigate "translation equivalence" of various kinds. The position I take with respect to linguistic relativity and the Universal Base hypothesis may be compared to the view taken in semiotic research. Shaumyan (1984), for instance, points out that linguistic relativity itself is relative: it is relative to semiotic invariance. Relativity and invariance, on this view, are in a complementary relationship, comparable to Bohr's famous complementarity of wave and particle theories of light. For a semiotician, the primitives are: (a) X is a sign of Y, and (b) Y is a meaning of X. Shaumyan proposes a principle of semiotic relevance governing the level at which semiotic research operates: "only those distinctions between meanings are relevant that correlate with the distinctions between their signs, and vice versa, only those distinctions between signs are relevant that correlate with the distinctions between their meanings" (239). This principle constrains the degree of abstraction in linguistics, and it also constrains the level at which CFA operates. We posit invariance, as an initial operational assumption, when no relevant distinctions are being drawn; but, as we have argued earlier, what counts as relevant depends on many factors and is itself variable. In different terms, as suggested earlier, the level at which CFA seeks to operate might be regarded as that of natural linguistic categories: fuzzy, but assumed to be similarly accessible to speakers of different languages. Against this view, it might be argued that natural categories, being prototypes, are culture-specific and thus not universally shared. This point has been made by Ivir ( 1987), and also by Kalisz (1988), who argues further that all contrastive analysis must therefore be implicitly directional, since the analysis must proceed from the analyst's own culture-bound cognitive perception of reality. True. Different cultures will manifest different "dominant semes" (Tarasova 1993) in a

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given field of experience. Yet we are not necessarily always determined by our native language/culture; it exerts what Popper called a "plastic control" over us, not a mechanical one. A bilingual analyst can call upon cognitive resources in more than one language. And, as was also stressed above, human beings are endowed with imagination: it is not impossible for people to see things from another point of view. What the contrastivist can do is compare prototypes, and see to what extent they overlap (as Krzeszowski does in his study of over in English and Polish, 1990: 213f). Theoretically, therefore, it would be more accurate to say that the level at which CFA seeks to operate is slightly "deeper" than that of culture-specific natural prototypical categories: that is, a level at \ ' which the overlaps can be formulated between such prototypes.

1.5.

CFA Methodology

Traditionally, contrastive methodology starts with a description of selected data. James (1980: 63) sees two basic processes: description and comparison. In his examples he uses a four-step algorithm: (1) assemble the data, (2) formulate the description (3) supplement the data as required, (4) formulate the contrasts. Krzeszowski (1990: 35) sets up three steps for "classical" contrastive studies: (1) description, (2) juxtaposition, (3) comparison. Additionally, of course, the descriptions must use the same theoretical model. The model chosen will then naturally determine how the contrasts are formulated. Both scholarswould agree that the primary data are partly factual, for instance attested sentence-pairs of maximally literal translations, and partly intuitive, generated by the competence of a bilingual informant. Simplistically, at the comparison stage we can then state that (a) certain items in the two languages are identical in some respects, (b) the items compared are different in some respects, or (c) an item in one language has no equivalent in the other language (cf. Krzeszowski 1990: 37-8). At this point, however, we meet the circularity problem mentioned earlier: if an item in one language has no equivalent in the other language, on what grounds are we comparing the two in the first place? On the traditional view, assumed equivalence is the justification for selecting data to be compared; so how can equivalence (identity) then also be proposed as a result of the analysis? The standard solution to the problem has been a recourse to the different levels of meaning and form, in one way or another. So we can say: the meanings are equivalent (initial, assumed equivalence) and the forms turn out to be equivalent in this respect but nonequivalent in that respect (result); or: the forms are equivalent (initial) and the meanings prove to be identical/different (result).

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In more sophisticated terms, consider the following research procedure proposed by Krzeszowski (1990: 101) for directional contrastive pragmatic studies: I. Given a socio-cultural setting m (Cm) in a language i (CmLi), is there an

equivalent socio-cultural setting n (Cn) in language j (CnCj)? If the answer is "no", note the socio-cultural contrast. If the answer is "yes": II. Is there a linguistic form (Fq) in Lj (FqLj) which is prototypically associated with CnLj in a way similar to the way in which FpLi is associated with CmLi? If the answer is "no", note the pragmatic contrast. If the answer is "yes": Ill. Is FqLj a se man to-syntactic equivalent of FpLi? If the answer is "no", abandon the analysis. If the answer is "yes", proceed with semanto-syntactic contrastive studies until you find contrast at some level of analysis

In essence, this procedure follows the same methodology: look for an equivalent and then start comparing, checking for similarities and contrasts. In the light of the arguments of the foregoing sections, however, I would like to suggest an alternative methodology which seems to correspond more closely to what contrastivists actually do. This proposal has a number of other advantages, too. It does not depend on a notion of equivalence-as-identity, which would appear to be a red herring anyway. It does not place the result-cart before the initial-assumption-horse. It acknowledges that people tend to think in natural, fuzzy categories. It therefore assumes that shared properties or universals too are moie likely to be natural categories than billiard-ball-like atoms. And it incorporates an explicit notion of falsifiability which can place contrastive studies on a firm empirical footing. I call this the CFA methodology. The proposal derives directly from Popper's (e.g. 1972) philosophy of science. Popper argues that all growth of objective knowledge proceeds as a form of problem-solving, in which hypotheses (tentative theories) are suggested, tested and refuted, giving rise to revised hypotheses which are in turn tested and revised, and so on in an endless process of conjecture and refutation. On this view, the goal of cross-linguistic comparisons is to propose and test falsifiable hypotheses, and their theoretical value lies precisely in this function (see also Janicki 1990). Falsification is not necessarily deemed to have occurred by virtue of a single counter-example, however: such counter-examples may be genuine exceptions, or peripheral in some way. Non-naive falsification requires a whole body of counter-evidence, outweighing the evidence in favour of the hypothesis. In practice, falsification is thus ultimately a matter of the judgement of the scientific community at large.

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In outline, my proposal for a general CFA methodology runs as follows: 1. Primary data: instances of language behaviour in different languages. 2. Comparability criterion: a perceived similarity, of any kind, between a phenomenon X in language A and a phenomenon Y in language B. For a given contrastive analysis, this criterion is then defined operationally in terms of a constraint of relevant similarity. 3. Problem: what is the nature of this similarity? 4. Initial hypothesis: that X and Y are identical. 5. Test: on what grounds can the initial hypothesis be supported or rejected? On what conditions (if ever) does it hold? 6. Revised hypothesis (if the identity hypothesis fails): that the relation between X and Y is such-and-such; or, that the use of X and Y depends on such-and-such conditions. 7. Testing of the revised hypothesis. And so on.

1.5.1. Primary Data Let us examine and illustrate this procedure in more detail, and see what it implies. The primary data against which hypotheses are to be tested are utterances, instances of language use. We observe, as facts, that speakers of language A use certain forms, and that speakers of language B use other forms. We can also observe the conditions (or at least some of them) under which certain forms are used. From these observations we infer underlying, unobservable systems or sets of potential choices, which we attempt to codify as grammars. We also infer meanings. Some would identify meanings with conditions of use, but it will be more useful in this book to keep these concepts separate. On this view, meanings themselves are not observable directly, but we do have some access to them, in three ways. First, I have subjective access to my own meanings, as when I say "I mean X"; these are meanings-as-intentions, and exist in Popper's World 2, the subjective world of feelings and mental states (World 1 being the physical world). True, I do not have direct access to other people's meanings-asintentions; and, as Labov (1987) stresses in a warning article, intentions are of course hard to define anyway, especially those of other people. It would be a risky enterprise to base a functional theory on meanings-as-intentions. Second, I have intersubjective access to other people's meanings, as when I say "it means X", insofar as I have learned the relevant language or other semiotic code; these are meanings-as-conventions, and they exist in Popper's

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World 3, the world of ideas, arguments, objective knowledge that lies in the public domain, accessible to all. Since World 3 phenomena interact with and affect World 2 phenomena, the mind (qua World 2 phenomenon) is thus to some extent also a social construct. From meanings-as-conventions I can also infer other people's meanings-as-intentions, to some extent at least. On this definition, contrastivists are therefore interested in meanings-as-conventions. (I am of course by-passing an enormous literature on meaning here, but these few comments will suffice in the present context.) Third, I also have some access to the effects of utterances, on the way people tend to interpret them, as when I say "it meant X to me" or "it seemed to mean X to her". We might caii this an access to meaning-as-intervention. Pinker (1994) takes this kind of meaning as the opening theme of his book The Language Instinct: he talks of our ability to "shape events in each other's brains". "Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds" (15). This image of putting ideas into someone's head iiiustrates meaning-as-intervention rather well: a speaker can intervene, literally, in a hearer's mental processes. We can assume, moreover, that communication is successful to the extent that meanings-as-intentions overlap with the effects of meanings-as-interventions (cf. bstman 1979). In other words, if a speaker's meaning-as-intention is X, this can be said to be communicated to a hearer to the extent that the speaker creates within the hearer an awareness of X. This is another way of arriving at the central notion of conventions: in time, we learn that certain meanings-asintentions conventionally correlate with certain perceived effects. 1.5.2. Comparability Criterion and Similarity Constraint

The starting-point for a given CFA-type analysis is a perception, made by a linguist, a translator, a language learner. This is a perception of a similarity of some kind, in the first instance of form or sound, between language-A-speakers' use of their language and language-B-speakers' use of theirs. Making a similar point, Janicki (1986: 1240) speaks of "a perceivable amount of sameness" as the initial reason for making a comparison. At one remove from the primary data, we can infer that these similarities reflect similarities at the level of langue, or we may infer that there is some similarity of meaning-as-convention or meaning-asintervention. It is this perception, not some assumed equivalence, that provides the initial comparability criterion. This initial perception may be vague, may be only a suspicion (asked why a raven is like a writing-desk, I suspect some hidden similarity and start looking for it). For the language learner, this initial perception is the potential trigger for interference. For the contrastivist, it is the

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reason why X and Y are worth comparing. It is significant that this initial perception is often vague, unspecified: one task of contrastive research is to clarify and specify such perceptions. An example: as a newcomer entering Finnish from English, I was struck by the way the case opposition between the partitive and the nominative/accusative in Finnish seemed to correlate with article usage in English. There seemed to be some similarity between the general areas of meaning expressed by these two means: they both had to do somehow with definiteness. I also noticed that I found the use of this case opposition difficult to learn, and that Finns found English articles difficult. As pointed out in the section on similarities ( 1.1 ), any assessment of similarity is constrained by relevance. Any contrastive study therefore has to define the criteria by which phenomena are judged similar, which is precisely what the constraint of relevant similarity does. In this example, the similarity constraint can be defined in terms of the concept of definiteness. A contrastive analysis would focus on the variation in the expression of aspects of meaning falling within the scope of this general concept, in both languages. It would exclude, for example, other aspects of meaning that might be expressed by the same means (say, by a particular Finnish case). In practice, the similarity constraint thus sets an upper bound to the range of phenomena considered to be relevantly similar, for the purposes of a particular study. (The similarity constraint is discussed further below, 2.2.) It must be acknowledged that some contrastivists reject a methodology based on a similarity constraint. Van Buren (1980), for instance, advocates a "notional" approach to contrastive analysis, but argues that this must be based on an identity condition rather than a similarity one. Arguing that an Aspects-type grammar is not very useful for contrastive analysis because it implies that deep structures in different languages are similar rather than identical, he claims ( 1980: 94) that "the disadvantage of the similarity condition is that the notion of substantive universals (or 'common categories' for our purpose) becomes incoherent." I think this argument is predicated on an unwarranted belief in Aristotelian categories rather than prototypical or fuzzy ones. In this sense, the identity view is cognitively much less plausible than one centred on similarity. Ivir (1983) is critical of the view that translation equivalence is automatically assumed to incorporate "sameness" of meaning, and he is thus also critical of contrastive analyses that implicitly build upon such an assumption, using translations as data. !vir's solution is to exploit the use of back-translation in order to eliminate differences that are motivated by communicative aims rather than by the intrinsic natures of the languages themselves; the resulting translated and back-translated corpora are therefore more constrained, pruned of irrelevant

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differences, and closer to being semantically identical. Absolute equivalence, identity, is nevertheless acknowledged to be impossible. What Ivir does, in fact, is to develop his own operational definition not of sameness but of similarity: his similarity constraint is arrived at via the procedure of back-translation, for pairs of sentences that cannot be mutually back-translated are deemed to lie outside the range of acceptable data for contrastive analysis. 1.5.3. Problem and Initial Identity Hypothesis

The problem in my example case was easy to define: what was the precise relation between the English ways of expressing definiteness and the Finnish ways? (And incidentially: why these learning difficulties?) In the CFA methodology the initial hypothesis of identity has the same status as the null hypothesis in experimental studies: one sets out to reject it, but the interesting thing is how one does this, and how convincingly: with what probability can one say that it has been rejected? Bouton (1976: 144) makes the same point: "[A contrastivist's] initial choice is based upon an [sic] hypothesis that the two elements he selects are equivalent in a sense important to his study. And his contrastive analysis will consist of determining to what degree that hypothesis was valid." As we have seen in the preceding sections, equivalenceas-identity is an exception, often an impossibility. Actually to find idtmtity would be an interesting surprise; the more determinedly one has set out to reject the hypothesis, the more interesting such a result would be. In Popper's terms, such an identity would be exceedingly well corroborated. In my example, the initial identity hypothesis was that the definite/indefinite opposition in the English articles eo-varied exactly with that between the nominative/accusative and the partitive cases in Finnish. Such a correlation would of course be exceedingly unlikely, on the grounds of the learning difficulty alone. However, this is more or less the correlation that language learners tend to make (at a given stage of learning); it is this identity hypothesis that lies at the root of interference, as we saw above. From this point of view, learning proceeds as the initial identity hypothesis is understood to be false and interference is thus reduced. 1.5.4. Hypothesis Testing

The initial hypothesis is falsifiablc, in that it can be empirically tested. And the testing of this initial hypothesis is the central process in CFA. This stage encompasses many procedures: selection of a theoretical framework, selection or elicitation of primary and additional data, use of corpora (translated or otherwise

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relevantly matched), appeal to one's own intuition (one's own native-speaker, , bilingual or translation competence), use of other bilingual informants, and so : on; even the results of error analyses of non-native usage might be relevant. The amount of testing that is necessary depends on the complexity of the phenomena compared. A simple universalist hypothesis may be easily refuted by a single counter-example, for instance of a Finnish accusative/partitive opposition that does not eo-vary with English article variation. But how then to account for the examples that support the hypothesis? The hypothesis becomes a relativist one: under what conditions does it seem to hold and under what conditions does it not hold? Then the testing becomes more complex. In the definiteness example, all the above forms of hypothesis-testing have been made use of (see Chesterman 1991 ). The result of this testing stage is a statement of the evidence in favour of the initial hypothesis and the evidence against. The evidence in favour amounts to an explication of why a similarity between X and Y was perceived in the first place: under such-and-such conditions there is indeed such-and-such an overlap. The evidence against amounts to an explication of why the identity hypothesis is rejected: there are such-and-such differences. On this view, it is the evidence in favour that actually constitutes the tertium comparationis (or, for the translator, : ( the ground for translation). In this methodology, the tertium comparationis is ;' thus what we aim to arrive at, after a rigorous analysis; it crystallizes whatever is (to some extent) common to X and Y. It is thus an explicit specification of the initial comparability criterion, but it is not identical with it - hence there is no circularity here. Using an economic metaphor, we could say that the tertium comparationis thus arrived at adds value to the initial perception of comparability, in that the analysis has added explicitness, precision, perhaps formalization; it may also have provided added information, added insights, added perception. The definiteness study referred to came to the conclusion that the concepts of definiteness in English and Finnish did overlap somewhat, but that there were 1 also considerable differences. A tertium comparationis was eventually formulated \ consisting of a number of shared semantic components. It was demonstrated that these were expressed in very different ways in the two languages, and that some of the components themselves were gradient concepts differently conceived of in the two languages. In particular, it was shown that whereas definiteness has become highly grammaticalized in English, it is much more diffuse in Finnish, where its expression spreads over a wide area of grammar (not just a single case 1 opposition), and furthermore it is often not expressed at all but left to be inferred. , The lack of similarity overall is proportionately so great that learning difficulties (both ways) are scarcely surprising, despite the initial perception of some apparent similarity. The initial perception thus led to a more differentiated one:

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definiteness itself turned out to be not a semantic primitive but a complex concept, and also a gradient one. This CFA methodology therefore differs from the traditional one in its interpretation of the tertium comparationis. Traditionally, this has been taken as the starting-point of a comparison; however, as suggested above, this view risks circularity, in that some kind of equivalence is both assumed at the start and arrived at in the conclusion. In the methodology proposed here, the starting-point for a comparison is not an equivalence but a perceived similarity: the startingpoint is this perception. The perception is then refined and operationally defined as a similarity constraint, specifying the acceptable range of similarity. The relation of identity (equivalence) occurs first in the initial hypothesis to be tested, and perhaps also as part of the result of such testing.

1.5.5. Revised Hypotheses The statement of evidence which completes the testing stage can obviously be formulated in many ways, depending on the model of description used. However it is done, it in fact constitutes a revised hypothesis proposing that the relation between X and Y is not one of identity but of such-and-such a kind; in other words, the relation consists of these similarities and these differences, these overlapping features and these distinctive ones. This revised hypothesis can then in turn be stated in a falsifiable form, subject t~ testing, in the following way. There are three main classes of variables here: meaning, syntactic form, and conditions of use. In principle, testable predictions can be constructed by positing one or two of these as independent variables and the remaining one(s) as the dependent variable(s). For instance, given a meaning M and a form F, we can predict conditions of use C and test the prediction. Given a meaning M and conditions C, we can predict the occurrence of form F and test the prediction. And given a form F and conditions C, we can predict that the interpretation will be meaning M. The result of such testing will be the establishment of contrasts of various kinds: of form, meaning, or conditions of use. Consider the following informal contrastive formulations, for instance, which illustrate versions of the three basic set-ups: (i) Under conditions [a, b, c], the meaning expressed in language 1 as X tends to be expressed in language 2 as Y. (Contrast of form) (ii) Under conditions [a, b, c], the meaning expressed in language 1 as X is not expressed in language 2 at all. (Contrast of form and use)

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(.iii) Under conditions [a, b, c], a form Fin language 1 is interpreted as meaning X and a similar form F' in language 2 is interpreted as meaning Y. (Contrast of meaning) (iv) The use of a form Fin language 1 is sensitive to conditions [a, b, c], but the use of a similar form F' in language 2 is sensitive to conditions (a, e, f]. (Contrast of conditions of use) (v) Under conditions [a, b, c], speakers of language 1 tend to perform speech act P, while speakers of language 2 tend to perform speech act Q. (Contrast of meaning and form) Formulations such as these can be tested by setting up the relevant conditions or finding them in a corpus, and checking the behaviour of speakers (what they say, how they translate, how they understand, how they react to computer-generated or literal translations, etc.). The challenge for the contrastivist is to specify the conditions, be they syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, stylistic, contextual, or whatever. Since language behaviour, like any human behaviour, is predictable only to some extent, probabilistically, there is no point at which the conditions can be absolutely specified and language behaviour 100% predicted, and so the field is always open for better specifications. I stress this point because of the apparent belief in Contrastive Analysis that once an analysis has been done the problem is solved for good; not so, I think: the result of the analysis is no more than a (hopefully) better hypothesis. After all, arguments for a particular analysis of components of definiteness, for example, can always be countered by other arguments, new evidence may be brought to bear, errors of various kinds in the analysis or the hypothesis can be exposed and eliminated, and so on. Additionally, the testing stage may also result in hypotheses of a different kind, not pertaining only to given phenomena in a given pair of languages but to the two languages more generally: an excellent example is Hawkins (1986) on a fundamental and pervasive difference between English and German (his hypothesis is that English surface structure is consistently more distant from its semantic deep structure than German is from its semantic deep structure). Or hypotheses may be proposed concerning common characteristics of all languages of a certain type, or concerning universal characteristics of all languages. In this way CFA links up with language typology and ideas about universal grammar. Of particular importance in the CFA methodology is the relation between corpus studies and hypothesis testing. Hypotheses may arise from many sources, including mere subjective intuition: any perception of a similarity, on whatever grounds. Corpus studies are a good source of hypotheses. But they are above all a place where hypotheses are tested, albeit not the only place. The more

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stringently a given hypothesis is tested- against a corpus, other speakers' intuitions, in a controlled experiment... - the better corroborated it will be. In conclusion, the methodology outlined above might be summed up in terms of Peirce's famous distinction between the three modes of reasoning: induction, deduction and abduction (1958, passim). Induction was the method preferred by the behaviourists in the 1940s and 1950s; deduction was the primary methodology used by the transformationists in the l960s and l970s (a good example is Krzeszowski's axiomatic Contrastive Generative Grammar, 1974). Abduction is a mode of reasoning that hypothesizes that something may be the case; its claims are therefore weaker than those arrived at via induction or deduction, but it is fundamental to scientific progress. It is a kind of rational. guesswork, and is the only way (according to Peirce) of opening up new intellectual ground, of stepping from the necessary to the possible.

Chapter 2. Functional

2.1. Grammar as a Tool Factory Contrastive Functional Analysis (CFA) can be broadly defined as a functional approach to Contrastive Analysis. This chapter explores what is thus meant by "functional". Language is as it is because of what it is used for. To subscribe to this statement is to take a functional view of language. "Language has evolved to satisfy human needs; and the way it is organized is functional with respect to these needs" (Halliday 1985: xiii). This explication of the term "functional" gives it a very broad interpretation, but one that is well in line with the everyday use of the word. We say that something- a tool, for instance- is "functional" if it can do what it is supposed to do, in other words if its form meets the requirements set by its use. Fillmore (1984) actually refers to grammar as a "tool factory"; pragmatics is then the description of how workmen use these tools, and semantics corresponds to "the knowledge of the purposes for which the individual tools were constructed" (122). In this extended metaphor, a text is then "a record of the tools used in carrying out an activity", and understanding is "figuring out, from the list of tools, just what that activity was" ( 123). To do this figuring out, one needs to know the conventions of how the to

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