What is Contrastive Analysis

WHAT IS CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS?

CARRIZO, NoeliaCHAIN, Andrea

FAERMAN, SandraGORDILLO, Eugenia

The place of CA in LinguisticsLINGUISTICS: It is the scientific study of language. The study of the nature, structure, and

variation of language, including Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Sociolinguistics, and Pragmatics.

A LINGUIST is a person whose main aim is the professional study of a language. His or her studies may be devoted to different fields such as:

Teaching one or more languages Translation and Interpretation Language Families or Language History PhilosophyAs LINGUISTS we can find polyglots (multilingual),

teachers, anthropologists, philologers, historians, philosophers, among others.

LINGUISTIC ENTERPRISEENTERPRISE: A systematic purposeful activity. Project Organization LINGUISTIC ENTERPRISE is the

relationship between language and the different scientific fields with which Linguists are concerned.

LINGUISTIC ENTERPRISEDIMENSIONS:1)Two different approaches to Linguistics: GENERALIST: Linguists consider the

general phenomenon of human language. They can be philosophers.

PARTICULARIST: Linguists treat individual languages. They tend to be anthropologists or philologers.

LINGUISTIC ENTERPRISE - DIMENSIONS

PHILOLOGY is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.

ANTHROPOLOGY is the study of the human race, especially its origins, development, customs and beliefs.

PHILOSOPHY is the study of the nature and meaning of the universe and human life.


2) Linguists study language either in isolation or in a comparative way.

Someone who studies a language in isolation deals with the inherent parts of the particular language that makes it unique and different from others.

Comparativist shares the assumption that languages are unique but they also say that languages share similar features which can be compared and classified into types.


Linguistic Typology: Synthetic It is a language in which the greatest number of

ideas is comprised in the least number of words.For example: English: antidisestablishmentarianism Spanish: antidesestructurante- escribiendomelo Finish: juoksentelisinkohan. "I wonder if I should

run around (aimlessly)"


Analytic These languages have free morphemes

considered to be independent words. It uses very few bound morphemes such as English prefixes and suffixes (Refill;slowLY) and in the inflexions of English nouns and verbs (boxES; talkING; talkED)


Inflectional In these languages, grammatical relationships

are expressed by changing the internal structure of the words through inflections. Suffixes express several grammatical meanings.

For example in English: Tense: write- wrote-written Number: child-children Gender: actor-actress


Agglutinating In linguistics, agglutination is the

morphological process of adding affixes to the base of a word.

For example Japanese expresses fusion in otōto ( 弟 younger brother), from oto+hito.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%BC%9F


Tone In a tone language, different tones will change the meaning

of the words, even if the pronunciation of the word is the same.

There are many languages in which the tone can determine meaning of the word, and changing from one tone to another can completely change the meaning. For example:

In Kono, a language of west Africa, we find the following:

High level: ¯bεη (“uncle”) ¯buu (“horn”) Low level: _bεη (“greedy”) _buu (“to be cross”)

In Mandarin Chinese for example:

¯ma (“mother”) /ma (“hemp”) \ma (“scold”)

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation


3) we can distinguish “two sciences of language”:DIACHRONIC: The study of language change. It has five main

concerns: to describe and account for observed changes in

particular languages to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and

determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families

to develop general theories about how and why language changes

to describe the history of speech communities to study the history of words, i.e. etymology


SYNCHRONIC: The study of the grammar, classification,

and arrangement of the features of a language at a given time, without reference to the history of the language or comparison with other languages.

For example: linguistic typology .

WHAT IS CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS?

The nature of contrastive analysis as a linguistic enterprise Neither generalist nor particularist. Interested in both the nature of the language and its

comparison with other languages. It doesn’t consider classifications. It is not synchronic.CA seems to be a hybrid linguistic enterprise.

* CA is a linguistic enterprise aimed at producing contrastive language systems and founded on the assumption that languages can be compared.

CA AS INTERLANGUAGE STUDY Linguistics has as its object of study any human language

in general. It consist of a variety of branches which are concentrated on parts of whole languages. For example:

Phonetics: it is concerned with human noises by which

the message is given audible shape Dialectology: Dialectology is a study of language that

focuses on understanding dialects. When dialectologists study language they are principally concerned with identifying how the same language can vary, based on a number of circumstances. This does not simply mean pronunciation changes, but can also mean differences in word choice, spelling and other factors.

CA AS INTERLANGUAGE STUDY 3 Kinds of DIALECTS can be

distinguished. HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIAL

HISTORICAL DIALECTSThe letter /k/ and /tʃ/ were represented by /c/Examples: cyssan “to kiss” cinn “chin”

ge (plural) pu (singular) today we use “you” in both

cases.

GEOGRAPHICAL DIALECTS Also called a regional dialect. A dialect that

appears primarily in a geographic area, as opposed to a dialect that appears primarily in an ethnic group or social caste.

The study of dialects with regard to their geographic distribution, as well as how their distribution may be affected by geography, e.g., the spread of a particular dialect being halted at a mountain range, forest belt, body of water, etc.

SOCIAL DIALECTS /r/ that comes before a vowel as in car or

star People of high social class have the

tendency to omit this sound. Suffix- ing In words like swimming and sleeping there

are two types of pronunciation: /in/ and /iɳ/ Higher social classes use more /in/

compared to /iɳ/.

CA AS INTERLANGUAGE STUDY

Interlanguage study: A linguistic system that results from a

second language learner attempt to produce the target language. It is considered to be a separate linguistic system from the native language and target language.

CA AS INTERLANGUAGE STUDY Within the interlingual study there are three branches: Translation theory: the study of how texts from one language are

transformed into comparable texts in another language. Error analysis: in error analysis learning develops in different

stages as learners interact with the environment. It looks at the errors made by learners while they are learning and asks questions about them. For example: the student who may change “sat” to “seated” or “sated” because the past tense “ed” has just been internalized. Error analysis looks at such errors positively and considers them necessary to the development of language, be it first or second.

Contrastive Analysis: it considers L1 to be mainly an interference to the mastery of L2

CA as Interlanguage studyINTERLANGUAGE STUDIES We have to take into account the two

languages concerned (SL/NL and FL/TL). The focus of attention is on the intermediate

space between these languages. The language which appears in this

intermediate state is called INTERLINGUA according to translation theory.

It is a system which includes the analysis characteristics of the source language and the synthesis characteristics of target language.

CA AS “PURE” OR “APPLIED” LINGUISTICS

APPLIED LINGUISTICS An interdisciplinary field of study that

identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, psychology, anthropology and sociology.


PURE LINGUISTIC Pure or general linguistics aims to study general

properties of language independently from other disciplines. In addition, it studies linguistic properties primarily for its own sake, not for application purposes.

It is important to mention that pure linguists have

been practicing something very similar to CA. their interests are not comparative, contrastive, or typological, but lie in the universals of language.


CA analysis is a form of both “pure” and “applied” linguistics. While “pure” CA is not relevant in “pure” linguistics, it is the major concern of applied linguistics.

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What is Contrastive Analysis