Negative Substratum Transfer From Romanian To English Final Draft

Negative Substratum Transfer from Romanian to English 1

Negative Substratum Transfer from Romanian to English Eduard C. Hanganu B.A., M.A., Linguistics Lecturer in English, UE

Draft 5 Revised – December 11, 2014 © 2014

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Abstract In his research on bilingualism, Weinreich (1953) saw “interference” between the two languages of the bilingual, marked by deviations from the grammatical norms of either language. Lado referred to the process as a “transfer of forms, meanings and culture” from the native language of the speaker to his second or foreign language (1957:2). Corder (1981) and Sharwood Smith (1986) redefined the notion as a “cross-linguistic influence” that included the third and fourth language of the learner, while Odlin (2000) confirmed the concept of transfer with empirical evidence. Research data shows that transfer occurs whenever two or more languages come into contact, and that these influences are affected in two directions: from the native language of the learner to the second language (“substratum transfer”), and from the second language to the native language (“borrowing transfer”). The influence of one language on the other could be positive, facilitating the acquisition of lexicon and grammar, or negative, revealed in the morphological, lexical or pragmatic divergence from the target language. This paper looks for evidence of transfer errors or negative substratum transfer in the written English of a native Romanian.

Key words: L1, L2, language transfer, substratum transfer, borrowing transfer, negative substratum

transfer,

transfer

errors,

first

language,

second

language.

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Negative Substratum Transfer from Romanian to English Introduction In 1990, a group of Romanian and American friends were having a pleasant conversation in a New York apartment, when a young lady in the group started to complain about her age. Knowing that she was not even 40 yet, one of the Romanian men said to her in a consoling voice: “Do not cry. You are not old; you are only a chicken.” All the American friends burst into loud laughter, to the consternation of the Romanian man, who did not understand what mistake he had made in order to produce such amusement in the group. Someone then explained to him that he misused the word “chicken,” and that in the context of the conversation the proper word was “chick.” While “chicken” is used in English to describe someone “timorous or defenseless as a chicken” (OED), the term “chick” is a metaphorical expression applied to women in order to suggest young age. Because there is no such distinction in the Romanian language, where the same word is used to express both concepts, our Romanian friend had not understood the lexical difference between the English words, and had transferred the word’s lexical meaning from Romanian to English, unaware of the difference. The semantic “interference” that caused trouble for the Romanian in this situation is an example of the kind of semantic, lexical, syntactic, pragmatic and discourse problems encountered by second language learners because of crosslinguistic influence from their native language.

Language Transfer: The Background Weinreich is one language scholar whose research in bilingualism and languages in contact led to linguistic concepts that would evolve later into the contemporary hypothesis of

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interlanguage. Interested in the relationship of the two languages in the bilingual’s mind, Weinreich wrote his dissertation in 1951 on bilinguals in Switzerland, and incorporated it two years later in his book, Languages in Contact (1953). Weinreich envisioned the two languages spoken by the bilingual as two linguistic systems related to each other, and saw instances of deviation from the norms of either language that occurred in the speech of the bilingual as cases of “interference”—the outcome of the speaker’s knowledge of the two languages. As an illustration of such unwanted “interference,” Weinreich mentions the case of the German speaker who says, “Yesterday came he” because he had modeled it on the German syntactic structure Gestern kam er (p. 33). The problems created by “interference” were also of great concern among the American language teachers, based on their conviction that the native language could have a dominant influence on the learning of a second or foreign language. Fries defined the issues associated with learning a second language in the following words: Learning a second language…constitutes a very different task from learning the first language. The basic problems arise not out of any essential difficulty in the features of the new language themselves, but primarily out of the special ‘set’ created by the first language habits. (Lado 1957:2) He also formulated a solution to these problems and included it in his book Teaching and Learning English – As a Foreign Language (1945): The most effective [language teaching] materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner. (p. 9)

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Lado was in agreement with Fries that the first language constituted the most important obstacle facing the learner of a second language. In his book, Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), he expressed the conviction that learning a second language could be made much easier if the teacher knew the differences between the native language of the learner and the new language the learner was attempting to learn: We assume that the student who comes in contact with a foreign language will find some features of it quite easy and others extremely difficult. Those elements that are similar to his native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult. The teacher who has made a comparison of the foreign language with the native language of the student will know better what the real learning problems are and can better provide for teaching them. (p. 2) Weinreich and Lado held different views on transfer. Weinreich perceived “interference” as the main source of learning problems and therefore not desired, because the errors committed by the learner were unwanted deviations from the language norms, or inadequate productions of language. Lado, on the other hand, recognized both the unwanted results of negative transfer as in the case of a German’s selection of “it” when he talked about a small child (because the noun “child” is neuter in German), and the benefits of the positive transfer the learner encounters when he learns a language closely related to his own native language, as in the case of the German learners of English or of the French learners of Spanish. In Lado’s perspective, the basic process in second language learning is the projection of the system of the first language onto the system of the second language. Because the most difficult second language areas for the language learner are those that differ from his first language, and the easiest ones are those similar to his native tongue, the learner focuses on the

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differences. The role of the teacher then should be to recommend the best strategies that would allow the learner to deal with those differences. Lado was also aware of the importance of both linguistic and cultural factors in the acquisition of a second language. He stated: …individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings, and the distribution of forms and meanings of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture – both productively when attempting to speak the language and to act in the culture, and receptively when attempting to grasp and understand the language and the culture as practiced by the natives. (1957: 2) In 1957, Lado developed the Contrastive Analysis method, a comparison of the first and second language in the areas of phonology, grammar, writing and culture, and published it in his book, Linguistics Across Cultures. The basic idea was a process of “mapping” the structure of the first language to the second language structure, so that the differences and similarities could be clearly identified, and predictions could be made about the kinds of difficulties the learner might encounter in his endeavor to learn the second language. A question that remained to be answered under the generative perspective on languages was: “How does a child’s undeveloped grammar change in order to acquire adult linguistic competence?” A possible answer was that children reformulated their grammar again and again through a system of “hypothesis testing,” and that their language structures were intermediate, or progressive approximations of the adult language. Such ideas inspired a new wave of second language acquisition (SLA) research: “Could a second language learner use in fact a similar, intermediate, language system which is neither based in his native language grammar nor in the grammar of the language he is learning?”

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In the early 1960s, Nemser suggested the idea of an “approximate grammar system” in the framework of a “deviant” learner language. In an article entitled Approximate systems of foreign language learners, published in 1971, he wrote: Learner speech at a given time is the patterned product of a linguistic system… distinct from [NL] and [TL] and internally structured. (1971: 116) In 1972 Selinker published, in his own words, “the infamous and unnamed 1972 paper” (1996: 1), his classic article entitled Interlanguage, in which the term “interlanguage” appeared for the first time. In the article, Selinker proposed the existence of a dissimilar learner’s system that had an intermediate structure between the speaker’s native language and the second or foreign language, and was independent from both. Besides the independent grammar, the article also postulated the presence of a psychological device that would generate and control the interlanguage grammar. Corder (1981) stated that successive stages of the learner’s grammar were indicative of a process through which the learner was organizing the knowledge available to him, a “transitional competence.” While Lado (1957) saw in the mistakes the learner made an incorrect use of the target language, Corder made a distinction between “errors” and “mistakes” (1981: 38). He saw “mistakes” as random and one-time events, recognizable and correctable by the learner, while “errors” were systematic, deviant forms not recognized as wrong by the learner. Corder also argued that the errors present in the learner’s language production were an important source of information rather than a negative, undesired phenomenon. Error analysis therefore became a valuable research tool both for teachers and researchers.

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Language Transfer Involves Culture Transfer Lado recognized the cultural contents in language transfer when he stated in his book, Linguistics Across Cultures, that “individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings, and the distribution of forms and meanings of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture” and dedicated a chapter of his book to issues related to transfer of culture through language and the comparison of cultures (Lado 1957: 2). His emphasis on language and culture was generally ignored, though, and therefore most of the work on contrastive analysis done in the 1950s and 1960s dealt with pronunciation and grammar, which prompted Kaplan to warn researchers in 1966 that cultural differences caused the papers written by foreign students to be out of focus because their logic constructions were following their cultural standards. Kaplan also suggested contrastive studies above the sentence level, something that is now known as “contrastive rhetoric” (1967: 18). Because the morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse of the native language differ from those of the second language, transfer of the native language structures to the second language can cause the learner to express something very different from what he intended to express and from what the speaker of the target language would infer, producing confusion and misunderstanding between the two speakers.

Language Influences in Transfer The evolution of the learner’s interlanguage is marked at every stage by influences from the source and target language. Weinreich (1953) saw the deviation from the norms of either language as “interference,” while Lado (1953) understood it as a process of “transfer” of forms, meanings and culture from the native language to the interlanguage. Because “transfer” had its origins in a behaviorist theory of language, Corder (1981) suggested the need of another term,

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“mother tongue influence,” which would reflect the new understanding of language acquisition processes. It was Sharwood Smith, though, who refined the idea further to a “cross-linguistic influence” in 1986, extending the concept of language influence to even a third or fourth language (1986: 45). Increased research in second language acquisition and “transfer” or “cross linguistic influence” provided good evidence for the importance of transfer in second language learning in relation to the diversity of situations in which language transfer takes place. While Weinreich (1953) had used the term “interference” to refer to all situations in which transfer occurs, his research on bilingualism showed that transfer effects differ with the social context of the languages in contact. Scholars like Thomason, Kaufman and Odlin, distinguish two kinds of transfer, “borrowing transfer” and “substratum transfer” (see Odlin p. 12). “Borrowing transfer” refers to the influence of the second language on the native language of the learner. “Substratum transfer,” on the other hand, is the influence of the source language (the native language of the learner) on the learning of the second or target language. This category of transfer is investigated the most in studies of second language acquisition. According to Odlin, “borrowing transfer normally begins at the lexical level, since the attrition of the language absorbing the foreign vocabulary normally begins with the onset of strong cultural influences from speakers of another language” (2000:13). This happens because the social group speaking the second language is often large, with great prestige and political power. Substratum transfer, though, will be more evident in the pronunciation and syntax and less in the lexicon. Weinreich (1953) defined the cross linguistic influence in bilingualism as “interference” because he thought that most if not all of the mistakes the second language learner made were caused by the influence of his native language on the new language. In this sense, he saw

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interference as “negative transfer or language production errors, because it involves deviation from the norms of the target language” (p. 31). Negative transfer, though, includes, besides production errors, underproduction and overproduction errors, and defective language structures that could lead to misinterpretation mistakes. But not all effects of language transfer are negative. Second language learners come to the acquisition of the second language with a rich and useful language resource—the mother tongue. Without some degree of language transfer from their first language, a second language would be very difficult or impossible to learn. Gass and Selinker (2001) warn about some confusion in the use of the “positive transfer” and “negative transfer” terms in second language literature. They state: …the actual determination of whether or not a learner has positively transferred is based on the output, as analysed by the researcher, teacher, native speaker/hearer, and so forth. In other words, the terms refer to the product, although the use implies a process. There is a process of transfer; there is not a process of negative and positive transfer. Thus, one must be careful when using terminology of this sort because the terminology suggests confusion between product and process. (p. 68)

Language Transfer Errors: The Evidence If the native language of the learner causes “negative transfer” into the second language, what areas of the second language structure are impacted by such an influence? Kean attempts to answer this question in his paper entitled Core issues in transfer (1986). According to him, the structure of language contains two major areas, the core and the periphery. The core area is subject to fundamental UG (universal grammar) principles, and is an essential element of the

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interlanguage, while the periphery contains “particular phenomena, not defining properties of the grammars of natural languages” (1986: 20), which is optional. The native language of the learner could cause lexical intrusion and semantic ambiguity in the second language learner’s interlanguage, influence the acquisition of negation, sentence word order and subject pronoun drop, and cause trouble with the use of relative clauses. At discourse level the language learner could transfer from his native language lexical items and expressions in inappropriate contexts. Second language learner’s deviations from the second language norms have been assessed through Contrastive Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Error Analysis, and more recently, Rhetoric Analysis. Contrastive Analysis Contrastive Analysis is a method of language comparison. The sound systems, morphological systems, syntactic systems and the cultural systems of the two languages are compared in order to discover the similarities and differences. Discourse Analysis Discourse Analysis compares the wide range of structural and nonstructural discourse patterns across languages. Cross-linguistic comparison of discourse is difficult because models of discourse are nonlinear, complex and difficult to test (Odlin p. 48). Error Analysis Error Analysis focuses on the errors the learner makes in his efforts to produce target language structures. While Contrastive Analysis attributed all the errors to the influence of the first language, Error Analysis looks at brands of errors: interlingual and intralingual. Interlingual errors are caused by native language influence and entail cross-linguistic comparison, while the

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intralingual errors belong to the learner’s interlanguage system and are language specific. Because the learner’s system is individual and unique, the learner will not be able to recognize the errors he makes because they belong to his interlanguage grammar, but he will notice his slips of tongue, the mistakes he makes. The learner’s errors therefore need to be evaluated relative to external norms—the second language grammar. Rhetoric Analysis Rhetoric Analysis owes its origins to Robert Kaplan (1967), who researched the differences between texts written by members of different cultures in relation to the writers’ assessment of their English, and sought to understand the relationship between culture, writing style and evaluation (Saez pp. 1-2). The main issue under examination in Contrastive Rhetoric is whether there are differences between texts written by writers who belong to different cultures, and whether these differences affected the organization and structure of texts.

Research Data and Purpose of the Paper In this paper, I am going to look for evidence of substratum transfer from Romanian to English in a MA thesis entitled An Exegetical Study of Daniel 7-9 written by Florin Laiu, a Hebrew and Greek scholar and Biblical Exegesis Professor at the Adventist Theological Institute in Bucharest, Romania, in an endeavor to locate the errors and categorize them. My working hypothesis is that the text of the thesis will show semantic and lexical errors, problems with restricted lexical English between the Romanian and the English words, article and nonreferential subjects “it” and “there,” usage error, verbal phrase transfer, and negation and preposition transfer errors from Romanian to English. This interference between the two languages will occur due to factors of cultural distance and similarity between the Romanian and

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the English languages. I will then discus and analyze the errors, in an attempt to verify if they confirm or deny my initial hypothesis.

Language Errors in Lexical Transfer Though it is still not clear how much the semantic structure of the native language influences second language knowledge, lexical similarities between two languages makes it easier for the learner to acquire words and their meanings. Among the problems related to this similarity, Odlin (2000) mentions the faux amis, or “false friends,” the partial identity of cognates, the divergence between the grammatical restrictions on words in the two languages, and the problem of lexical innovation or meaning approximation (pp. 77- 81).

False Romanian Friends 1. Trask defines “false friends” or faux amis as two words in different languages which have similar forms but different meanings, such as English “library” and French librairie, whose equivalent in English is “book shop” (p. 84). In the sentence below, the Romanian writer uses the word “pretentious” to stand for the English “difficult” or “complex,” because he believes that a Romanian word with the same form has the same meaning in English. He does not realize that the English word means at this time “showy” or “ostentatious,” and that the Romanian pretentious, “‘demanding,” and the English word “pretentious” are false friends. Proceeding to such a pretentious study I had understandably to face the need of a critical introduction to Daniel…. (Laiu p. 4)

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2. The current sense of the English word “personage” in OED is “a representation or figure of a person; an image or effigy; a statue or portrait.” There is also an outdated meaning, “one of the persons or characters of a drama or of a dramatic poem, story, etc.; also one of the actors on the stage of history.” This outdated sense corresponds to the current usage of the word in Romanian, and this is the reason the author of the thesis uses the English “personage,” in the sense of the Romanian word personaj: So why be so eager to get rid of the old Darius. If only a literary personage, he is practically unnecessary in the book. (Laiu p. 27) 3. In the following example the author uses “scheme” to refer to a chart, because of the Romanian false friend schema that means “chart.” The current sense of the English word “scheme” is “a plan for doing something” (often with a negative connotation), which means that the proper English word in the passage below should be “chart,” and not “scheme:” The scheme above is based on an early date of the Exodus (1445 B.C.E.) under the Pharaoh Amenhotep II, the only date that matches the record of 1K 6:1. While dates are approximate, they are nonetheless telling. (Laiu p. 152) 4. The Romanian word atractiv means in English “interesting” or “captivating,” while the English word “attractive” means “engaging, pleasing, winning or alluring.” In the paragraph below the Romanian author considers them equivalent because they are false friends: The linguistic and historical exegesis of the Book shed more favourable light on the position above, building a more attractive and useful model of faithful hermeneutic. (Laiu p. 189)

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5. The Romanian word satisfacator has the sense of “adequate” or “sufficient,” while the current English meaning of “satisfactory” is “serving to satisfy a debt or obligation.” The proper English word in the sentence below should therefore be “adequate,” and not “satisfactory:” The Hebrew of Daniel was not thoroughly studied as Samuel-Kings and Chronicles or Ezekiel. Many opinions concerning this book are based on philosophical or belief and unbelief patterns of thought, than on a satisfactory study. (Laiu p. 32) 6. Sometimes it is difficult to decide what specific meaning of the English word the writer had in mind, as in the following example: The vision of Daniel provides us a political analysis to help trace a philosophy and a sense of history. Heaven and earth, human and beasts, an Ancient of Days and an ephemeral little horn, lasting a little more than its measured 3 and 1/2 times, stand in high contrast. (Laiu p. 91) The Romanian word masurat could mean “decided,” “evaluated,” or “assessed.” When the writer used the word “measured,” did he have this meaning in mind, or was he simply referring to the time calculation that is the primary meaning of the English word, “determined, apportioned, or dealt out by measure”? 7. Autorizatie is the Romanian word that means in English “permit” (as in “building permit” or “permit for firearms”). “Authorization,” on the other hand, means in English “the conferment of legality; formal warrant, or sanction.” Because the author refers to the building of a temple in the context of his thesis, the right English word in the sentence below should be “permit,” not “authorization:”

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It is hard to believe that such people would have run the immense political risk of building without authorization, in times when this could mean death penalty. (Laiu p. 166) 8. The example below is another instance of lexical transfer: It is easy to observe that the old translations do not so precisely agree on this point. The pragmatic meaning of the term in this place seems to escape. (Laiu p. 65) The Romanian verb a observa is equivalent to the English verbs “to see,” or “to notice.” The writer believes that the English word has the same meaning as the Romanian word, but in fact the English “to observe” means, “to attend to in practice; to keep; to follow; to adhere to, follow (a method, rule, or principle of action).” The right word in the sentence above then is “see” and not “observe.” 9. The verb “to stress” means in English “to subject to hardship; to afflict, distress, harass, oppress.” In the example here, though, the Romanian writer uses the word “stress” in the sense of “emphasize” because the Romanian word accent is similar to another Romanian word stress, and both words are used figuratively in Romanian as “to emphasize.” So, we notice here the transfer of a cumulative figurative meaning from two Romanian words that have the metaphorical meaning of the English word “emphasize.” Because of the homonymy between the Romanian a stresa and the English “to stress,” the author uses the English word to mean “emphasize” in ignorance of the true sense of the word in English, and the most common use (OED) “to subject to hardship; to afflict, distress, harass, oppress:” The “angelus interpres” does not stress the king’s activity or success in this area, but only his insolent aspiration, his bold project. (Laiu p. 66)

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10. The following transfer occurrence is based on a recent lexical transfer from English to Romanian. With the arrival of computers in Romania, there was felt an acute need of adequate computer language, which the Romanian language lacked. One of the borrowed words was the verb “to list,” which is used in contemporary Romanian as a lista. The author of the article seems to think that the English verbs “to list,” and “to enlist” have the same meaning, and therefore transfers the Romanian a lista into English as “to enlist,” unaware of the fact that “to enlist” means in English “to enroll on the list of a military body, to engage as a soldier:” The vision certainly enlists subsequent powers who oppressed in some way God’s people and any scheme that would introduce a separate Median kingdom between the Babylonian and the Persian kingdoms is at least strange. (Laiu p. 70) 11. Sometimes a Romanian word cannot be translated through a single equivalent English word, but needs to be rendered through a phrase, as is the case with the Romanian expression indiferent cum, which means in English “no matter how.” The Romanian writer transfers the Romanian word indiferent into English, unaware that the English “indifferently” is quite different from what it was thought to mean, and that it means, according to OED, “without difference or distinction; equally, alike, indiscriminately,” which is far from the meaning of the Romanian word. The rendering of the Romanian word indiferent for the English word “indifferently” is an example of negative lexical transfer, and is incorrect: Indifferently how one translates ‘nitzdak’ of Daniel 8:14, ‘cleansed’, ‘vindicated’ or whatever is to be finally dealt with the Sanctuary…. (Laiu p. 187) “Indifferently how,” therefore, is not equivalent to the Romanian indifferent cum, but was used in the quoted paragraph because the expressions are similar in English and Romanian.

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Lexical Usage Restricted in English In the example below the Romanian writer uses the verb “to remind” with the meaning “to remember” because the Romanian equivalent verb means not only “to remind” but also “to remember.” This lexical transfer from Romanian does not match the lexical restriction on the English verb: Reminding that the Bible was given us for practical purposes, we are safe in accepting its divine message, and free to treat the words as they are, giving each of them what it deserves. (Laiu p. 13)

Lexical Phrase Transfer from Romanian In the examples below the thesis author has transferred full lexical phrases from Romanian to English, perhaps in the belief that these phrases had the same lexical structure and semantic meaning both in Romanian and English. 1. A common Romanian phrase is exces de bunavointa, which could be translated into the English dynamic equivalent “going out of your way,” but literally means in Romanian “goodness/kindness in excess.” The Romanian writer therefore appears to have literally converted the Romanian expression into English, but violated the true meaning of the Romanian phrase by making two lexical mistakes: 1. he used the word “benevolence” as a match for “goodness,” while the English word “benevolence” actually means “kindness, generosity, charitable feeling,” and 2. he distorted the original meaning of the Romanian expression, which now seems to mean “excessive generosity:” With some excess of benevolence, one might add before Seleukos I (the founder of the dynasty), Alexander the Great (333-323 B.C.E.), but the 11th place is still not available for Epiphanes. (Laiu p. 71)

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2. A rather common metaphoric expression in Romanian is galaxii de cititori, which is the equivalent of the English lexical phrase “thousands of readers,” but literally means “galaxies of readers.” While the Romanian expression, though, is culturally established in the Romanian language and understood, the English reader would have a very difficult time making sense of it, therefore this transfer creates a sense of ambiguity and confusion for the English language reader: The Book of Daniel attracted galaxies of readers from all times, because of its majestic themes and impressive apocalyptic language. (Laiu p. 4) 3. In other cases, the word for word or literal translation of a Romanian phrase, though it violates the lexical patterns of the English language, is not far from the meaning of the original Romanian expression, as this example below indicates: It is a hard trial to definitely choose among these options. I favour solution nr. 4, without being dogmatic. (Laiu p. 181) Here, the Romanian expression incercare grea found a direct equivalent in the English phrase “hard trial,” though the lexical phrase sounds awkward and irrelevant to the issues under discussion. Probably a better way to express the though in English would have been: Choosing between these options is very difficult. I prefer the solution nr. 4, without being dogmatic about my choice. 4. Descoperire epocala is a language cliché Romanians use. Its English equivalent is “great discovery,” or “amazing discovery.” The writer converted the Romanian expression word for word into English, though, rendering it “epochal discovery,” which seems to be another clear case of lexical phrase transfer:

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In spite of his epochal discovery, which attested the historical accuracy of at least Daniel 5, the subtle mind of some hypercritics is not satisfied. (Laiu p. 23)

Definite Article Transfer 1. Romanian learners of English have trouble learning the English definite and indefinite articles because of the different ways these articles are used in the two languages. In the example below, the Romanian writer uses a definite article to define a generic noun because in Romanian generic nouns take definite articles: The true Christian love has its inherent hatred against injustice, cruelty and lie. (Laiu p. 5) In the Romanian phrase adevarata iubire crestina, “the true Christian love,” the Romanian word adevarata is articulated with the definite article, and this is why the Romanian writer translates the phrase into English as “the true Christian love.” 2. In this second example, the generic English word “history” is articulated with the definite article, because in the Romanian language one would write: Istoria nu cunoaste, with the word istoria articulated with the definite article,: The history has no knowledge of a separate, Median kingdom between the Babylonian and the Persian kingdom. The Iranian universal rule was a dual Empire. (Laiu p. 69) Nonreferential Subjects “It” and “There” The nonreferential “it” and “there” subjects in English are another difficulty for second and foreign language learners, including Romanians, despite their common occurrence. Romanian, like Spanish and Italian, does not require a surface subject. The sentences below require nonreferential “there,” but the Romanian writer used “it” in an incomplete attempt to use

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the nonreferential article in English, emulating the Romanian sentence structure. In this first example, the English sentence should read: There was no need to pass by a lot of generations in order to give Jeremiah such credit. The Romanian writer, though, expressed the idea as: It was no need to pass a lot of generations to give Jeremiah such credit. (Laiu p. 33) because in Romanian one writes: Nu era nevoie (literally, “not was need”). In this second example, the sentence again requires “there” but the author transfers syntax from Romanian into the English sentence, rendering it: And it is actually complete silence from a strictly scientific point of view, so that Grabbe is glad to join von Soden in his postulation that the author of Daniel 4 recorded a folk tale inspired from The Prayer of Nabonidus, discovered at Qumrân. (Laiu p. 26) The proper syntactic formulation in English should be: And there is actually complete silence from a strictly scientific point of view… The error occurs because in Romanian this sentence is written: Si de fapt este tacere deplina… (literally, “and in fact, is complete silence”).

Verbal Phrase Transfer The phrases below seem to be literal renderings of Romanian phrases, or direct syntactic transfer from Romanian: 1. In this example the verbal phrase “fell with brio” is the word for word rendering of the Romanian verbal phrase a cazut cu brio: Thus the former ‘scientific’ objection fell with brio. (Laiu p. 26) 2. In this second example, another Romanian verbal phrase fac fata in mod brilliant testului pragmatic is transliterated as “face brilliantly the pragmatic test.”

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While it is true that historicist exegetes have often abused apocalyptic figures, so that their traditional hermeneutic key fell in disgrace, there are at least two apocalyptic periods where the year-day key, face brilliantly the pragmatic test. (Laiu p. 87) 3. Here, the Romanian author transfers another verbal phrase, cu care ma lupt (“with whom I fight”), into the English “which I am fighting with.” In Romanian, one generally says cu care ma lupt (“with whom I fight”), and only seldom impotriva cui ma lupt (“against whom I fight”). A better expression would have been “against whom I am fighting:” This might be seen as insolence, in view of the fact that I do not present a complete image of the new paradigm, which I am fighting with. (Laiu p. 30)

Negation Transfer from Romanian Negation is problematic to second and foreign language learners, and its study is not a simple matter of word order. In some languages negators precede verb phrases, as in Spanish, while in other languages, as in German, negative devices follow the verb phrase in the sentence. Word order is a formal structure, while negation is a semantic notion, which provides “an important clue to relations between transfer and universals in second language acquisition” (Odlin p.105). Some languages place negative particles in different positions in the sentence, form their negative particle in different ways, and allow multiple negations in one sentence. At the lexical level, English generally uses a negative affix to convey negativity, at the phrase level, “no” is the negative determiner in the noun phrase, while at the sentence level, “not” is the main sentence-level negator. English also contracts “not” in speech and informal writing. Odlin cites work done by Ravem (1968), Wode (1981-1983), Cancino, Rosansky and Schumann (1878), Hyltenstam (1977), and Stauble (1984) which indicates that second language

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learners acquire negation in stages, but that transfer does not appear to account fully for this acquisition, and that quite often contrastive analysis predictions on negation acquisition fail to anticipate the learner’s difficulties of production (pp. 104-110). Wode (1981) found evidence of three stages in the acquisition of negation: 1. one-word negation; 2. two or more word negation; and 3. intrasentential negation. His analysis showed that the acquisition and evolution of negation is similar in the first and second languages (Odlin p. 106). The thesis writer seems to have difficulty with English negation. In some circumstances he uses a nonstandard syntactic structure for negation, while in other examples his use of negation is quite ambiguous and confusing. I selected a few examples of negation problems in his thesis in order to illustrate these difficulties: The common structure of a negative postauxiliary sentence in English is: Subject + Auxiliary + Negation + Verb Phrase 1. In the example below, the author of the thesis uses a negative structure similar to the Romanian negative sentence, but inverts the positions of the verb and negation. The typical Romanian negative sentence is: Demonstrative + Noun + Negation + Verb + Quantifier + Preposition + Noun Phrase Aceasta limba nu are deaface mult cu natura ingerilor (literally, “This language not has to do a lot with the nature of the angels”). The Romanian writer, though, inverted the order in the Romanian sentence, and used an English structure without auxiliary, Demonstrative + Noun + Verb + Negation + Quantifier + Infinitive + Preposition + Noun Phrase as can be seen below:

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This language has not much to do about the angels’ nature; it is instructive to underline the importance of the message to be delivered. (Laiu p. 144) which is transliterated as aceasta language are nu deaface mult cu ingerii. This appears to be a case of partial transfer and interference between the formation of negation in Romanian and English. A similar case of inversion can be seen in the sentence below: The believer wants to betray not his faith. The unbeliever needs no evidence that leaves some room for the faith (just full demonstrations!). (Laiu p. 12) which again seems to reflect a syntactic structure between English and Romanian. The Romanian syntax would be formulated as nu vrea sa-si tradeze credinta (literally “wants not to betray his faith”), while the English syntax should be “does not want to betray his faith.” 2. The next two sentences seem even more difficult to interpret, because they do not appear to belong to either Romanian or English negation syntax. I assume that they are evidence of the learner’s efforts to integrate the English negation into his interlanguage system, a process not yet completed: Daniel calls him a ‘man’, not to ascribe him human nature. (Laiu p. 144) The sentence above should have been formulated as “but not in order to ascribe to him a human nature,” while the one below should read “And let’s not forget that….” And not to forget that all these are Old Persian words, most of them occurring in the history of the language not later than 300 BC. (Laiu p. 32)

3. This last case of negation seems to be the most confusing of all, and probably needs clarification from the writer himself:

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The author is very impressed and, if not expresses his own satisfaction, at least he confirms the justice of this measure, repeating what he had said about the ram: ‘and there was none to rescue (the ram) from its power’ (comp. v. 4). (Laiu p. 108)

My attempted clarification of this ambiguity renders the sentence as: The author is very impressed, and though he doesn’t want to express his satisfaction [about the facts], at least he confirms the justice of this action, repeating what he had said about the ram… Here the problem goes beyond the negation usage trouble into thought formulation, and I assume that the writer could not find a good way to express his thoughts in English and resorted to this interim thought structure, which leaves the reader wondering what is the true meaning of the sentence.

Transfer of Preposition The English preposition seems to be another area where second language learners have trouble. Celce-Murcia comments on this matter: “Prepositions are notoriously difficult to learn. Long after ESL/EFL students have achieved a high level of proficiency in English, they still struggle with prepositions” (p. 401). According to her, there are two reasons for these difficulties: 1. The work of prepositions is performed in other languages through inflections, and 2. Preposition usage differs from language to language (p. 401). The Romanian writer discussed in this paper has his share of the preposition acquisition difficulties, and his thesis contains numerous instances of preposition transfer from his native language to English. Here are a few examples:

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1. In the two examples below the writer transfers the use of the Romanian preposition into English, and instead of writing “at a time” and “at the same time,” he expresses himself in the Romanian way: intr-un timp (literally “in a time”) and in acelasi timp (“in the same time”). Why have young Jews tackling with the Babylonian learning, in a time when learning a pagan language as Greek, equated to growing pigs? (Laiu p. 44) As it was shown above, it is obvious that not all chapters were written in the same time. (Laiu p. 38) 2. In the next example, because the Romanian usage is consta in (“consists in”) the Romanian writer follows this pattern, and also uses “consists in” for English: In other words, the divine inspiration consists in their supernatural revelations. (Laiu p. 12) 3. As mentioned before, a common Romanian verbal phrase is cu care ma lupt (“with whom I fight”). In the example below, the writer uses the Romanian syntactic structure instead of a better English phrase, “which I am fighting against:” This might be seen as insolence, in view of the fact that I do not present a complete image of the new paradigm, which I am fighting with. (Laiu p. 90) 4. In this last example, the author uses the preposition “in” where the English language would not use any preposition, that is, “each morning and evening,” and not “in each morning and evening.” The writer’s confusion comes from the Romanian structure in fiecare dimineata si seara, with the literal English equivalent “in every morning and evening.” …we may conclude that in Daniel, the term refers to the same daily ritual that took place in each morning and evening… (Laiu p. 113)

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Conclusion In this paper, I had proposed that substratum transfer would occur from Romanian to English due to distance and likeness factors between the two languages. The examples provided seem, indeed, to offer persuasive evidence of substratum transfer occurrence from Romanian as a native language to English as a second language. Transfer occurred between the Romanian and English lexicons, demonstrated by semantic and lexical errors and problems with restricted lexical English between the Romanian and the English words, in the article area of the two languages and nonreferential subjects “it” and “there” usage error, verbal phrase transfer, and negation and preposition transfer errors from Romanian to English. This interference between the two languages occurred due to factors of distance and similarity between Romanian and English. While language transfer is not the most important factor in second language acquisition, and findings of transfer research should be interpreted with caution, the phenomenon of crosslinguistic influence as a reality of language contact cannot be ignored. Understanding transfer in both its positive and negative aspects has important implications for the teaching of a second language because cross-linguistic influences can significantly affect the rate and degree of second language acquisition, while most problems of cross-cultural communication, coherence and comprehension could find solutions in the proper application of linguistic knowledge related to transfer.

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Acquisition, ed. by Eric Kellerman and Michael Sharwood Smith. New York: Pergamon Press. Trask, R. L. (1997) A Student’s Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. New York, New York: Arnold. Weinreich, Uriel (1953) Languages in Contact. New York: Linguistic Circle and The Hague: Mouton.