Contrastive Linguistics

Modern contrastive linguistics intends to show in what ways the two
respective languages differ, in order to help in the solution of practical problems.

Sometimes the terms diachronic linguistics and synchronic linguistics are used to
refer to these two perspectives.
Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of
time, usually the present. By contrast, a diachronic approach considers the
development and evolution of a language through history. Because all synchronic
forms are the result of historically evolving diachronic changes, the ability to
explain linguistic constructions necessitates a focus on diachronic processes.
The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses
about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric
period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic
evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are
numerous theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-
Indo-Europeans, each with its own interpretation of the archaeological record.
The programme of contrastive linguistics was instigated by Charles
Carpenter Fries from the University of Michigan in the 1940s. Fries contended that
“the most effective materials in foreign language teaching are those that are based
upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with
a parallel description of the native language of the learner”. Some years later, this
project was put into practice by Fries’ colleague Robert Lado (1957).
Contrastive linguistics, since its inception by Robert Lado in the 1950s, has
often been linked to aspects of applied linguistics, e.g., to avoid interference errors
in foreign-language learning, as advocated by Di Pietro (1971) , to assist
interlingual transfer in the process of translating texts from one language into
another, as demonstrated by Vinay & Darbelnet (1958) and more recently by
Hatim (1997) , and to find lexical equivalents in the process of compiling bilingual
dictionaries, as illustrated by Heltai (1988) and Hartmann (1991).
Contrastive descriptions can occur at every level of linguistic structure:
speech sounds (phonology), written symbols (orthography), word-formation
(morphology), word meaning (lexicology), collocation (phraseology), sentence
structure (syntax) and complete discourse (textology). Various techniques used
in corpus linguistics have been shown to be relevant in intralingual and interlingual
contrastive studies, e.g. by 'parallel-text' analysis (Hartmann 1997). Contrastive
linguistic studies can also be applied to the differential description of one or more
varieties within a language, such as styles (contrastive rhetoric), dialects, registers
or terminologies of technical genres.
The assumption that foreign language teaching can be improved by

comparing the learner’s native language with the language to be learned came to be
known as the “Contrastive Hypothesis”. Its main assumptions can be summarized
as follows:
1) First language acquisition and foreign language learning differ fundamentally,
especially in those cases where the foreign language is learnt later than a mother
tongue and on the basis of the full mastery of that mother tongue.
Every language has its own specific structure. Similarities between the two
languages will cause no difficulties , but differences will, due to ‘negative
transfer’. The student’s learning task can therefore roughly be defined as the sum
of the differences between the two languages. A systematic comparison between
mother tongue and foreign language to be learnt will reveal both similarities and
contrasts.
On the basis of such a comparison it will be possible to predict or even rank
learning difficulties and to develop strategies (teaching materials, teaching
techniques, etc.) for making foreign language teaching more efficient. The
contrastive hypothesis in the form summarized above soon turned out to be too
optimistic. It was too undifferentiated in many respects and neglected important
parameters of second language acquisition (e.g. natural vs. mediated, sequential vs.
simultaneous, second vs. third language, etc.). Moreover, the contrastive
programme lacked a solid foundation in learning psychology and was never even
put on a reasonable empirical basis, insofar as the intention of producing
comprehensive comparisons of language pairs was never convincingly realized.
The enterprise of improving foreign language teaching on the basis of
pairwise language comparison was therefore abandoned before long, even though a
certain plausibility of at least some of the basic assumptions made by early
contrastive linguistics can hardly be denied (cf. Kortmann 1998). New impetus
was given to pairwise language comparison in a number of publications from the
1970s and 1980s that did not primarily pursue didactic purposes (e.g. König 1971,
Rohdenburg 1974, Plank 1984). These authors regarded contrastive linguistics as a
“limiting case of typological comparison” (König 1996: 51) which was
characterized by a small sample size and a high degree of granularity.
This typologically oriented approach culminated in John Hawkins’ (1986)
monograph A Comparative Typology of English and German – Unifying the
Contrasts. It was one of Hawkins’ primary objectives to discover correlations
between properties of specific grammatical subsystems (especially syntax and
morphology), with the ultimate goal of ‘unifying the contrasts’. Moreover,
Hawkins aimed at providing explanations for the correlations he observed and
related his contrastive analyses to theories of language processing (e.g. Hawkins
1992). Even though Hawkins’ hypotheses and generalizations met with criticism
(e.g. Kortmann & Meyer 1992, Rohdenburg 1992), they provided important
insights and helped establish contrastive linguistics as a type of language
comparison that was interesting and worthwhile in itself, without pursuing any
specific objectives related to second language acquisition or other linguistic
applications.
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a certain diversification in the field of
contrastive linguistics insofar as new topics came into the focus of attention (e.g.
pragmatics and discourse studies, cf. House & Blum-Kulka 1986, Oleksy 1989),
and new empirical methods were introduced, especially corpus-based ones (cf.
Section 4). The availability of specialized corpora (parallel corpora and learner
corpora) also led to a renewal of the link between contrastive linguistics and
linguistic applications, e.g. insofar as insights gained from (quantitative)
contrastive analyses turned out to be useful for translation studies (see e.g.
Johansson 1998a, Doherty 2001).
Most studies published under the label of ‘contrastive linguistics’ in the first
decade of the third millennium i.e. they pursue a basically theoretical (rather than
applied) interest but deal with pairs of languages that are ‘socio-culturally linked’.
In fact, the majority of articles published in the journal Languages in Contrast,
which was launched by the John Benjamins Publishing Company in 1998, deals
with European languages, especially Germanic and Romance ones. As far as the
topics investigated are concerned, there is a preponderance of discourse-related
studies, which may be due to the corpus-based methodology applied in most cases.
Recently, structural aspects of contrastive comparison have been brought back into
the focus of attention, e.g. by König & Gast (2009), who provide a comprehensive
comparison of English and German grammar.

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Modern contrastive linguistics intends to show in what ways the two

respective languages differ, in order to help in the solution of practical problems.

The assumption that foreign language teaching can be improved by

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