What is it about?
Alghough the concept of theme or topic has been widely researched both in Chinese and Spanish, no studies have been carried out about their thematic structure from the perspective of contrastive linguistics. Taking Loar's theory (2011) as a starting point, we have carried out a contrastive analysis and the results show that Chinese has not only a higher tendency to use topicalised constructions than Spanish, but also a wider range of constructions of this type. Both languages can use topicalisers and have also in common the word classes that can occupy the topic position. Nevertheless, Spanish is more flexible regarding the position of the topic. All these aspects are illustrated with numerous examples offering possible equivalents between this language pair. Therefore, this study can help to fill in a gap in these the fields of contrastive linguistics, didactics and translation.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
To our knowledge, this is the first work studying thematic structure in Chinese and Spanish from a comparative perspective, as well as adopting an applied approach to foreign language learning and translation.
Perspectives
All those teaching Chinese to Spansh speakers of viceversa should read this article to help their students improving reading comprehension and writing skills.
Dr Sara Rovira-Esteva
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: La estructura temática en chino y español: análisis contrastivo con aplicación en la didáctica de las Lenguas Extranjeras y la Traducción, Íkala Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, June 2016, Universidad de Antioquia,
DOI: 10.17533/udea.ikala.v21n02a05.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
