CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS First lecture Contrastive Analysis and Linguistics

CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS First lecture

Contrastive Analysis and Linguistics: A linguist is the person who is professionally engaged in the study and teaching of one or more languages. He is interested in language families, history and universality and relationship.

Contrastive Analysis and Linguistics: Linguists have always been interested in comparing and contrasting different language systems.

Linguistic studies can be done by following different approaches , thus Linguists are classified according to theses classifications into: Some linguists are interested in studying and analyzing one language with its peculiar characteristics. Those linguists are called particularists. They tend to study language in isolation.

Other linguists are generalists who are interested in studying languages in groups. They are not interested in one particular language. They study languages as a phenomenon of human life.

Those generalists study one language in comparison to other languages to find that every language may have its individuality, but all languages have enough in common. Thus we have classes of languages as Analytic, Synthetic, inflectional and tone languages.

Another linguistic approach is whether the study of language is synchronic or diachronic. Synchronic study according to De Saussure (1959) refers to the study of one language (one aspect of a language) at a specific point of its history.

Diachronic study refers to the study of one language (or one aspect of a language) at different times of its history.

A third approach refers to the way of studying languages either in: Isolation: when studying the properties of a language away from other languages. OR Comparative: When studying languages with comparison to each other.

What is Contrastive Analysis? The word contrastive implies that is it more interested in the differences and similarities between languages than being interested in languages families and history.

What is Contrastive Analysis? . Fisiak (1981) defines CA as "a subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the comparison of two or more languages or subsystems of language in order to determine both the differences and similarities between Them. "

What is Contrastive Analysis? In other words, CA is a branch of applied linguistics that is concerned with studying and finding the similarities and differences between a pair of languages or more based on the assumption that languages can be compared then applying these findings to the area of teaching and learning languages.

Robert Lado's formulation of the "Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis" in his “Linguistics across Cultures” (1957) is considered the greatest contribution in the field of CA studies.

WHAT IS THE NEED FOR CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS? After the World War II, the interest in teaching foreign languages increased in the USA and many linguists were concerned with the studies that tries to predict the learning difficulties on the basis of comparing the native language with the foreign language being learnt, and also the study of bilingualism and language contact phenomena.

WHAT IS THE NEED FOR CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS? It was originally known as Comparative Linguistics then it became known as Contrastive Linguistics, Contrastive Study, Contrastive Analysis, and Differential Linguistics where all these terms can be used interchangeably in the same context.

Transfer- Interference- and Cross-linguistic Influence: The term transfer/interference is dealt with in CA to explain the difficulties learners face in learning a second language. To avoid any misunderstanding, transfer is used interchangeably with interference. Transfer refers to the influence of L 1 on L 2 in both positive and negative way. Odlin (1989) presents a definition of transfer as " The influence resulting from the similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired. "

Both comparative and contrastive linguistics compare and contrast languages. But the scope, goals, and methods of each are different. Comparative linguistics compares and contrasts genetically-related languages diachronically (over time), whereas contrastive linguistics compares and contrasts languages which are culturally related (whether they’re genetically related or not!). This is because the goals are much different!

Moreover, the goals of comparative linguistics and contrastive linguistics are different. Comparative linguistics mainly informs the linguistic theory in its diachronic aspects. Though it may inform the linguistic theory in some way, contrastive linguistics has pedagogical goals in the field of translation and second language acquisition.

Comparative linguistics looks for commonalities and similarities. Contrastive linguistics looks at divergence and differentiation. We can also say that we need contrastive linguistics (contrastive analysis - CA for short) for language learning and language teaching as well as translation. Contrastive Linguistics is then part of Applied Linguistics. Comparative Linguistics, as they have already said above, is more concerned with comparing

What is positive and negative transfer? Positive transfer occurs where a language item in L 1 is also present in L 2, so acquisition of this item makes little or no difficulty for the learners. Negative transfer occurs when there is no concordance between L 1 and L 2 and thus, acquisition of the new L 2 structure would be more difficult and errors reflecting L 1 structure would be produced. (Powell: 1998) (PROVIDE EXAMPLES FROM ARABIC)

Difference between CL and Comp. L 1. Comparative linguistics makes a synchronic and diachronic comparison between two languages which are "genetically" similar; 2. Contrastive linguistics contrasts the structures of two languages in order to pick all the relevant differences.