Transcript File - CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS

CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS
LING 308
FIRST SEMESTER-131
YANBU UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
Ms. Sahar Deknash
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 L1 on L2 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."
What is positive and negative
transfer?
Positive transfer occurs where a language
item in L1 is also present in L2, so
acquisition of this item makes little or no
difficulty for the learners.
 Negative transfer occurs when there is
no concordance between L1 and L2 and
thus, acquisition of the new L2 structure
would be more difficult and errors reflecting
L1 structure would be produced. (Powell:
1998)
(PROVIDE EXAMPLES FROM ARABIC)

THANK YOU