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.

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.

This book examines the contribution of various recent developments in linguistics to contrastive analysis. The articles range across a broad gamut of languages, with most attention going to the languages of Europe. They show how advances in theory and computer technology are together impacting the field of contrastive linguistics. Part I focuses, from a broadly functional-cognitive viewpoint, on the close link with typology, stressing the importance of embedding the treatment of grammatical categories in their contexts of use. Part II turns to methodological issues, exploring the enormous potential offered by parallel, computer-accessible corpora to contrastive linguistics and to enhancing the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy of cross-linguistic studies. Part III is concerned with contrastive semantics, ranging from individual items to entire grammatical constructions, and shows how meanings are coupled to language-specific cognitive strategies and even to cultural differences in subjective awareness and the fashioning of personal identity.

This volume addresses a series of theoretical and methodological challenges in the domain of corpus-based contrastive studies. It provides an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (including transla

Contrastive Linguistics, like other linguistic disciplines, is becoming more and more data-oriented, relying increasingly on the statistical analysis of corpus data to reveal and investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between languages. This title illustrates this trend with a representative sample of contrastive linguistic case studies.

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.