Teaching the Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of the English Comparative: Insights from Natural Semantic Metalanguage Analysis  

Oleh:

Wijaya, David

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: KOLITA 13 : Konferensi Linguistik Tahunan Atma Jaya Ketiga Belas : Tingkat Internasional, Jakarta, 8-9 April 2015, page 181-185.
Topik: NSM; semantics; pragmatics; comparatives; language teaching
Fulltext: (181-185) David Wijaya - Teaching The Semantic . . . - 020415.pdf (173.11KB)

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This paper offers an alternative to traditional methods to understand and teach the meaning and use of English comparatives. Conventional accounts depend on scales, degrees, or standards of comparison to understand the way we use comparatives. Thus, the common method to teach the form has been greatly influenced by these accounts. However, the fact that one does not always think of scales or degrees when making a comparison and the fact that one can say about two warm bowl soups, ‘This soup is warmer than that one’, but not ‘That soup is cooler than this one’ show that traditional approaches are hardly communicative and cognitively implausible. A Natural Semantic Metalanguage (henceforth NSM) analysis by Goddard (2012), on the other hand, explains that this implausibility is due to distributional asymmetries in comparative statements. His analysis also demonstrates how the explication fits the communicative context in which a comparative is used. For example, the comparative sentence ‘Lamborghini is cheaper than Ferrari’ may be produced by someone who is choosing which two expensive cars would be more affordable to buy. This approach may serve as a basis for an alternative method to present English comparatives. Instead of using scales and degrees, instructors can provide comparatives in a more contextual and communicative way. Furthermore, since there is no scale or degree to display, teachers can use the basic schema proposed by Goddard to explicate the meaning of a comparative statement because it uses core vocabulary. However, learners may possess a different pragmatic or semantic concept of the construction in their first language. Therefore, teachers are advised to be selective in choosing the adjectives to be used in their comparative examples. It is expected that this method will consolidate the semantic and pragmatic concepts of the English comparative.

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