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JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
words. Nevertheless, it does not yet prove a positive substantial
influence of contextualization of items on their transparency.
To understand better variability of some series of equivalents,
a closer look can be taken at some of the items. Mémoire, for
instance, receives a rather rich series of equivalents (9+1),
splitting in two sub-series according to the signification of the
word that has been taken into account by the speaker. Some
speakers referred to mémoire meaning: “schopno
sť uchovávať a
vybavovať si vnemy”, “faculté comparable à un champ mental
dans lequel les souvenirs, proches ou lointains, sont enregistrés,
conservés et restitués”
8
corresponding to “the ability to
remember information, experiences, and people” and they
suggested equivalents such as
pamäť (5;11), pamätať (3;1),
zapamätať si (3;1), eventually – with a semantic shift – rozum
(3;1). Those who took into account mémoire as “zásoba vnemov,
ktoré sa môžu vybavovať” (“something that you remember from
the past”), proposed spomienka (5;11) or spomienky (4;16) as
equivalents. Finally, those who understood mémoire as “trvalá,
stála spomienka (na istú udalosť, na niekoho vzdialeného alebo
zomretého” (permanent memory of an event, of a distant or a
late person), “niečo starobylé, pripomínajúce minulosť,
pamätihodnosť“ (something ancient reminding of the past) or
“vec pripomínajúca niekoho, niečo“ (a thing reminding us of
something or somebody, a remembrance) suggested pamiatka
(5;2). Among other equivalents, there were pamäte (4;1)
corresponding to the English expression memoirs and the
internationally accepted word memorandum (2;1). Both of these,
belonging to the category of internationalisms, were probably
suggested for their formal similarity with the original French
item.
Series of equivalents give track of the presence of contact
phenomena, i.e. formal and semantic interlinguistic transfer. The
transfer is often – although not always – negative and leads to an
unacceptable equivalent. That is the case of words such as
priestory, biotop, územie, habitat suggested within the series of
equivalents of habitants (in English inhabitants) due to
a misleading formal similarity between the original item and
a bridge word habitat. The same reasoning can be observed for
zvyky, another unacceptable equivalents suggested for habitants,
where the bridge word has probably been taken from English
(habits). The effort to establish a semantic tie based on a formal
similarity has led to a mistaken equivalent. More cases of this
kind can be observed in the corpus (ex. európa, európsky as
equivalents for éruption; úbytok /in the sense of difference/ as
equivalent for difficile etc.) As it can be seen above (Tables 1
and 2), series of equivalents are rich in orthographic variations,
some of suggested words are not orthographed in a standard
way. Typically, diacritic signs are left out or added, e. g. erúpcia,
erupsia, érupcia; locálny, lokalne;
ťažky etc. It may be a result of
scriptural habits gained in electronic environments of
communication.
The metalinguistic and autoreflection-oriented component of the
test can be assessed only partially. An important part of
speakers, according to what was presupposed, did not respond to
this part of questions. They may have considered the task too
difficult in terms of time, organisation or complexity. They may
have felt insufficiently prepared for the intercomprehension test
itself and especially for an insight into their own multilingual
practices. Still, we can put together a basic quantitative and
qualitative assessment focusing on the dominant factors claimed
to have a positive influence on understanding French words. The
analysis of bridge words will be provided separately.
Among the factors facilitating the process of intercomprehension
we have suggested, for contextualized items, there were: A –
linguistic context, B – bridge tongue, C – both linguistic context
and bridge tongue, D – none of the aforementioned. The
speakers were not obliged to identify the helping factor for each
8
Meanings in
Slovak are taken from Slovník súčasného slovenského jazyka; meanings
in French are taken from Trésor de la langue française informatisé; meanings in
English are taken from the online version of Cambridge Dictionary
.
word, they were free to do so when they felt this identification
was possible.
In this part of the test, the role of linguistic repertories of the
speakers was clearly shown. In most cases, they were able to
realize the influence of a tongue familiar to them on
understanding French. They were able to tell which language
helped them and they put the finger on bridge words, too. Bridge
tongue was dominant for volcan, flammes, local, habitants and
éruption, i. e. for the five most transparent contextualized items.
Linguistic context was significant for none of these five. Some
speakers were inclined, for instance, to lean on linguistic context
in the case of dans, still contextual prediction were not of much
help to them. We can suppose that the speakers involved in this
study, like almost all the student population in Slovakia, are not
used to make the most of contextual prediction as a receptive
strategy. It can be viewed, indeed, as an occasion to get students
acquainted with this specific operation.
9 Conclusion
It follows from the results of our research that the students are
able to apply knowledge of other languages from their language
repertories for the comprehension of unknown foreign language.
They can find interlingual similarities and use them to orientate
themselves in the text. This ability should be supported and
developed in the learning and teaching processes. On the other
hand, it was found out that the context did not always help the
students to uncover the meaning of the text. They achieved
approximately the same results in comprehension of lexical units
in a context and without a context. To sum up, the context did
not play a crucial role in the students’ decoding the text in
unknown language. For this reason, it is important to use the
potential of the context in the supporting the language
acquisition and learning from the viewpoint of plurilingual
approach in foreign languages teaching.
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