An English-Spanish Contrastive Analysis of Culturally Loaded Phraseological Units Containing Kinship Terms
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Faculty of English Philology Master Dissertation - “Master Universitario en Lingüística Inglesa: Nuevas Aplicaciones y Comunicación Internacional” AN ENGLISH-SPANISH CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF CULTURALLY LOADED PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS CONTAINING KINSHIP TERMS Author: Marta De Toffol Tutor: Paloma Tejada Caller Septiembre de 2011 Faculty of English Phylology I ABSTRACT This paper focuses on phraseological units that contain kinship terms. The aim of this dissertation is verifying which cultural connotations of the selected terms are reflected in the phraseological units contained in the corpus and identifying any possible cross- cultural and linguistic difference or similitude. Data have been selected from dictionaries and colloquial language and analyzed conducting a qualitative contrastive analysis between English and Spanish. Results seem to demonstrate that the cultural connotations of each kinship term and phraseological units vary according to the language. Furthermore, they call for a deepest a more systematized “linguo-cultural” analysis within the field of phraseology and kinship. Key words: phraseology, kinship, culture, terminology. 2 Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 5 2 PHRASEOLOGY: GENERAL OVERVIEW. ................................................................................ 10 2.1 THE PHRASEOLOGICAL UNIT ....................................................................................... 13 2.1.1 FEATURES OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNIT ................................................................ 15 2.2 THE ENGLISH CONTEXT: ATTEMPTS OF CLASSIFICATION............................................ 24 2.3 THE SPANISH CONTEXT: ATTEMPTS OF CLASSIFICATION ........................................... 32 2.4 A GENERAL CONCLUSION ............................................................................................ 38 3 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE .................................................................................................. 40 3.1 DEFINITION OF KINSHIP .............................................................................................. 44 3.2 THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY AS A VARIETY OF KINSHIP ORGANIZATION ................ 45 3.2.1 THE FAMILY FUNCTIONS ..................................................................................... 46 3.3 KINSHIP STUDIES ......................................................................................................... 49 3.3.1 ALLIANCE CLASSIFICATIONS ................................................................................ 53 3.3.2 DESCENDENT SYSTEMS ....................................................................................... 54 3.3.3 KINSHIP TERMINOLOGY ...................................................................................... 56 3.4 THE METAPHORICAL USE OF KINSHIP TERMS ............................................................. 64 3.5 FICTIVE KINSHIP ........................................................................................................... 65 4 DATA AND METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................ 67 5 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION ................................................................................................ 70 6 CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................................................................... 93 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 97 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My most sincere thanks go to my supervisor, Dra. Paloma Tejada Caller, for her precious advice, guidance and encouragement in the writing of this Master Thesis. Also to my family for their support and to my husband for his love and understanding during the long hours of research and writing of this paper. Marta De Toffol Madrid 31 of August 2011 4 1 INTRODUCTION «La lengua es un continuo, un espacio sin límites ni fronteras, donde los lingüistas y estudiosos intentan la quimera de apresar con diversas etiquetas realidades heterogéneas y en permanente cambio», says J. Sanmartín (1998). Phraseology could be portrayed as gallery, where representations of the nation’s cultural customs are collected. Under this perspective, this field of language is not only the most colorful, but also probably the most egalitarian area of vocabulary and it drowses its resources mostly from the very depths of popular speech. Moreover, together with the study of synonyms and antonyms, phraseology represents one of the most expressive disciplines within linguistics. It is precisely due to its richness of expressions and to its heterogeneity that it seems difficult to identify which are the borders of phraseology. Delimiting the object of study of phraseology and finding a uniformed classification system seems to be a difficult task (Gläser 1988, Mel’cuk 1988, Howarth 1998, Ruiz Gurillo 1997, Cowie 1998, Moon 1998, Corpas Pastor 2000). In fact, the same terminological diversity that linguists (Fernando and Flavell, 1981, Gläser 1988, Corpas Pastor 2000) have used to refer both to the generic discipline and to the elements it studies highlights its instability. Despite the increasing amount of research within phraseology in the past fifty years, and the consequent improvement regarding the delimitation of the units that constitute its object of study, there seems to be still a great diversity of criteria. This hinders the consolidation of a systematic and scientific study of this topic. Due to this lack of consensus, the term “phraseological unit” - hereinafter PhU or PhUs – will be used in this paper. This decision has been taken for several reasons: firstly, because this term has the status of “a unit of language ” and it acts as such at different linguistic levels; secondly, because PhU is a term that we consider wide enough to embrace different types of language units, without confusing them with a subcategories and, thirdly, because it is one of the most widely accepted terms and, most of all, supported by the scholars of the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Countries, where many investigations regarding this topic have been carried out. 5 Beyond languages and linguistics, and the central role they play in the process of communication, nowadays it seems to be widely known among linguists and researchers that communication seems impossible if the speaker and the hearer do not share some basic knowledge and have at least a common referential framework (Austin 1955). Language and culture are thus seen as two similar interdependent systems (Nida 1999: 2-7), this means they influence each other. Culture represents a very important element in the communication process. At this respect, according to Luque & Manjón (1998), phraseology seems to be the discipline which best interprets and reflects the cultural framework of a whole society in the language, therefore it is also the field of study which can attempt to provide an explanation about stable expressions containing words loaded with a cultural meaning. V. Teliya and her colleagues (1993) argue that phraseology is a particular fruitful perspective for “linguo-cultural analysis”. Focusing on this type of study and having considered different authors (Murdock 1949, Radcliffe Brown 1952 and 1958, Kearl 1996-2010, Schwimmer 1997, Parkin 1997) there appears to be nothing more specifically cultural than kinship and family relationships. In fact most societies still think in terms of lineages and are organized in “families” of some sort using “kin” terms to classify relatives. Kinship and family seem to be two universals in most societies, though they find concrete different manifestations. Family and kinship seem to be among the most important aspects of human society, they play a central part in the social organization of peoples throughout the world. Nevertheless, the organization of the family unit and the structure of kinship relations vary from society to society and through time. The study of kinship and family falls particularly within the scope of three academic disciplines: sociology, anthropology, and social history1. 1 Sociological studies tend to concentrate on the form and organization of the modern family and on the social problems that surround family life. Anthropological studies also frequently concern the family, but their emphasis is on the variety of family organizations and on cross- cultural comparisons. Anthropologists are also interested in kinship ties and obligations beyond the immediate family, since these are often extremely important in small-scale non industrialized societies, on which anthropological studies tend to concentrate. Social and economic historians use the perspectives of a variety of disciplines, including psychology and economics, as well as sociology and anthropology. 6 Recent developments regarding kinship studies are relevant because they help to understand the different connotations that the same kinship term may have in different cultures. In fact, kin terms constitute a culture’s kinship vocabulary, a catalogue of the names assigned to relatives, (father, mother, uncle). They provide not only convenient labels, but also assist in the identification of important social categories and principles. The fact that kinship terms have a central role within the cultural-linguistic investigation is demonstrated also by the fact that they raise a very important