Lecture 12.1 CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS and Contrastive analysis

What is CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS? What does CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS mean? CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS meaning - CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS definition - CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS explanation. Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages (hence it is occasionally called "differential linguistics"). While traditional linguistic studies had developed comparative methods (comparative linguistics), chiefly to demonstrate family relations between cognate languages, or to illustrate the historical developments of one or more languages, modern contrastive linguistics intends to show in what ways the two respective languages differ, in order to help in the solution of practical problems. (Sometimes the terms diachronic linguistics and synchronic linguistics are used to refer to these two perspectives.)

Contrastive linguistics, since its inception by Robert Lado in the 1950s, has often been linked to aspects of applied linguistics, e.g., to avoid interference errors in foreign-language learning, as advocated by Di Pietro (1971) (see also contrastive analysis), to assist interlingual transfer in the process of translating texts from one language into another, as demonstrated by Vinay & Darbelnet (1958) and more recently by Hatim (1997) (see translation), and to find lexical equivalents in the process of compiling bilingual dictionaries, as illustrated by Heltai (1988) and Hartmann (1991) (see bilingual lexicography).

Contrastive analysis Contrastive descriptions or analysis can occur at every level of linguistic structure: speech sounds (phonology), written symbols (orthography), word-formation (morphology), word meaning (lexicology), collocation (phraseology), sentence structure (syntax) and complete discourse (textology). Various techniques used in corpus linguistics have been shown to be relevant in intralingual and interlingual contrastive studies, e.g. by 'parallel-text' analysis (Hartmann 1997). Contrastive linguistic studies can also be applied to the differential description of one or more varieties within a language, such as styles (contrastive rhetoric), dialects, registers or terminologies of technical genres.

Comparative linguistics, formerly Comparative Grammar, or Comparative Philology, study of the relationships or correspondences between two or more languages and the techniques used to discover whether the languages have a common ancestor. Comparative grammar was the most important branch of linguistics in the 19th century in Europe. Also called comparative philology, the study was originally stimulated by the discovery by Sir William Jones in 1786 that Sanskrit was related to Latin, Greek, and German.

Comparative method An assumption important to the comparative method is the Neogrammarian principle that the laws governing sound change are regular and have no exceptions that cannot be accounted for by some other regular phenomenon of language. As an example of the method, English is seen to be related to Italian if a number of words that have the same meaning and that have not been borrowed are compared: piede and foot, padre and father, pesce and fish. The initial sounds, although different, correspond regularly according to the pattern discovered by Jacob Grimm and named Grimms law (q.v.) after him; the other differences can be explained by other regular sound changes. Because regular correspondences between English and Italian are far too numerous to be coincidental, it becomes apparent that English and Italian stem from the same parent language. The comparative method was developed and used successfully in the 19th century to reconstruct this parent language, Proto-Indo-European, and has since been applied to the study of other language families.