CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND GREEK PREPOSITIONS

Prepositional usage presents Greek students of English with one of
their most serious learning problems. According to the theory of transfer
in foreign-language learning, a likely source of the problem is linguistic
interference caused by conflict either between the English and
Greek prepositional systems or within the former system itself--interlingual
and intralingual interference, respectively. A contrastive analysis
of these two systems at the syntactic and semantic levels serves
to pinpoint specific areas of such conflict. Transformational-generative
grammar provides a framework for the syntactic analysis of the systems,
but for their semantic analysis we use a variety of approaches. A brief
examination of four types of prepositional errors made by Greek students
of English, deletion, insertion, substitution, and dislocation, follm.;s
the contrastive analysis. This examination shows a close correlation between
the errors and the particular points of conflict revealed by the
contrastive analysis. The correlation demonstrates that linguistic interference
is a possible source of prepositional misuse by Greek students
of English.