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This book serves as an introduction to contrastive linguistics - the synchronic study of two or more languages, with the aim of discovering their differences and similarities, especially the former, and applying these discoveries to related areas of language study and practice. It discusses the principles and methods, and contrasts English, Chinese, German, and other languages at phonological, lexical, grammatical, textual, and pragmatic levels, focusing more on the useful insights contrastive analysis provides into real-world problems in fields such as applied linguistics, translation and translation studies, English or Chinese as a foreign language, and communication than on the discipline itself.
Contrastive Linguistics, roughly defined as a subdiscipline of linguistics which is concerned with the comparison of two or more (subsystems of) languages, has long been associated primarily with language teaching. Apart from this applied aspect, however, it also has a strong theoretical purpose, contributing to our understanding of language typology and language universals. Issues in theoretical CL, which also feature in this volume, are the choice of model, the notions of equivalence and contrast, and directionality of descriptions. Languages used for illustration in this volume include English, German, Danish, and Polish.
Contrastive Linguistics is the first book written by a linguist from mainland China on the histories and principles of comparing and contrasting Chinese and Western languages, specifically English. From Wilhelm von Humboldt's initial study in comparative linguistics to the present day, traditional scholarship in contrastive linguistics has taken a Western perspective and shown how foreign languages relate to the Indo-European language family. However, such a view has a limited scope, and there is an alternative history to contrastive linguistics. This book is an attempt by Professor Wenguo Pan to redress the balance in contrastive linguistics, comparing Western languages to Chinese, rather t...
Contrastive studies have experienced a dramatic revival in the last decades. By combining the methodological advantages of computer corpus linguistics and the possibility of contrasting texts in two or more languages, the structure and use of languages can be explored with greater accuracy, detail and empirical strength than before. The approach has also proved to have fruitful practical applications in a number of areas such as language teaching, lexicography, translation studies and computer-aided translation. This volume contains twelve studies comparing linguistic phenomena in English and seven other languages. The topics range from comparisons of specific lexical categories and word combinations to syntactic constructions and discourse phenomena such as cohesion and thematic structure. The studies highlight similarities and differences in the use, semantics and functions of the compared items, as well as the emergence of new meanings and language change. The emphasis varies from purely linguistic studies to those focusing on practical applications.
The papers in this collection throw fresh light on the relation between language contact and contrastive linguistics. The book focuses equally on the mutual influence of linguistic systems in contact and on the language contrasts that govern the linguistic behaviour of the bilingual speaker.
The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what k...
This book approaches the field of contrastive linguistics from a comparative and robust perspective that combines the tenets of construction grammar and cognitive linguistics. In doing so, it shows how their integration can help to successfully enhance research on contrastivity, by means of updated theoretical frameworks and applied methodologies that combine language and thought. It compares ten different languages and offers analyses of constructions at all levels of the linguistic organization, identifying the cognitive motivations that instantiate the linguistic data retrieved from corpora. Relevant to both cognitive and non-cognitive linguists interested in variation and contrastive approaches, as well as graduate students in these areas, this book makes a significant contribution to existing work on the various types of constructional and discourse-based phenomena in modern languages.
This is a book about comparison in linguistics in general, rather than 'contrastive analysis' as a distinct branch of linguistics. It addresses the question 'Does the analytical apparatus used by linguists allow comparisons to be made across languages?' Four major domains are considered in turn: derivational morphology, syntax, semantics & pragmatics, and discourse. Contributions cover a broad spectrum of linguistic disciplines, ranging from contrastive linguistics and linguistic typology to translation studies and historical linguistics.
What is contrastive analysis? - The psychological basic of contrastive analysis - The linguistic components of contrastive analysis - Microlinguistic contrastive analysis - Macrolinguistics and contrastive analysis - Pedagogical exploitation of contrastive analysis - Some issues of contention.
This book brings together a collection of articles characterized by two main themes: the contrastive study of parallel phenomena in two or more languages, and an essentially functional approach in which language is regarded, first and foremost, as a rich and complex communication system, inextricably embedded in sociocultural and psychological contexts of use. The majority of the studies reported is empirical in nature, many making use of corpora or other textual materials in the language(s) under investigation. The book begins with an introductory section in which the editors provide surveys of the state of the art in both functional and contrastive linguistics. The other five sections of the volume are devoted to (i) a cognitive perspective on form and function, (ii) information structure, (iii) collocations and formulaic language, (iv) language learning, and (v) discourse and culture.