Language property
The general property of language is reflexivity. The general property of language is reflexivity. The reflexiveness is distinguished in detail in contrastive studies at duality and cultural transmission.
Duality of human language refers of to the ability of to pattern and form meaningful units (both written and spoken).
Considering as a system of signs, language has two sides: one sign is of content and the other is of expression. They are as ‘two sides of the same coin’ or two levels of structure. It means, each linguistics or speech unit has its content and its linguistic expression. The property plays significant role in contrastive study.
The feature of two sides of meaning full units is described in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2: An equivalent in content expressed differently in English, Russian, French and Vietnamese.
Content (image)
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Linguistic expression
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watch
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часы
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regarder
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đồng hồ
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Content, sometimes in second language learning and contrastive studies, shares the meaning with concept, idea, image, symbol and signified in some aspects. It is the starting point for language acquisition. It is also one of the platform, the common ground for contrastive studies.
Each linguistic expression (or form), in turn obtains its sound and spelling (or writing). The two last components are those requests that must be worthy of attention in both second language learning, teaching and translation.
Language is embodied experience and a language is passed on from one generation to the next. Therefore, it function as the tool of cultural transmission and one of the language communicative competences are sociolinguistic ones. It is a significant object to determine in contrastive studies.
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