towards an analysis of errors made by university students ... - DSpace

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called a qualifier (q). 11 Moreover, in 'The car I had last
winter...'
"I had last winter* is part of the
identification of the car, and it cannot be
safely missed out. That is the reason why we
label it (q) for qualifier in the nominal
group, and not a separate clause in sentence
structure. It is a stretch of language which
looks like a clause, but behaves like a word;
internally it is a clause, externally it is a
word. Such a structure is called a rankshifted
structure, in this case a rankshifted clause. " 12
So far we have mentioned few examples where rankshifted
groups and a rankshifted clause have occurred. This concept of
rankshift is one of the important aspects in our analysis of
errors made in nominal groups since the misuse of the process
of rankshift has proved to be one of the difficulties
faced in
the process of translating certain nominal groups from English
into Portuguese. For example, Catford, 23 who adopts the systemic
grammar for his linguistic theory of translation, considers
'category-shift' any changes of structure, of classes, of
terms
in a system which may occur between the source-1anguage
(English,
in this case) and the target-language (Portuguese,in this case).
In'translating 'The thin, flexibls drum' a nominal group in
English whose headword is 'drum' and 'the thin, flexible' are
modifiers, our students find it difficult to shift the structure
(m) h into h (q) as the equivalent translation into Portuguese
requires; indeed, in the English nominal group 'The thi n, flexible
drum' we have the m m m h structure which would be shifted to
the
Portuguese m h q q structure, 'jd tfmpano del gado e f 1 exTve 1 ' . 14
m h q q
The insertion of a nominal group within another nominal group