Second edition

§ 1. Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive linguistics as a systematic branch of linguistic science is of fairly,
recent date though it is not the idea which is new but rather the systematisation and the underlying principles. It is common knowledge that comparison is the basic principle in comparative philology. However the aims and methods of comparative philology differ considerably from those of contrastive linguistics. The comparativist compares languages in order to trace their philogenic relationships. The material he draws for comparison consists mainly of individual sounds, sound combinations and words, the aim is to establish family relationship. The term used to describe this field of investigation is historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics.
Comparison is also applied in typological classification and analysis. This comparison classifies languages by types rather than origins and relationships. One of the purposes of typological comparison is to arrive at language universals — those elements and processes despite their surface diversity that all language have in common.
Contrastive linguistics attempts to find out similarities and differences in both philogenically related and non-related languages.
It is now universally recognised that contrastive linguistics is a field of particular interest to teachers of foreign languages.¹
In fact contrastive analysis grew as the result of the practical demands of language teaching methodology where it was empirically shown that the errors which are made recurrently by foreign language students can be often traced back to the differences in structure between the target language and the language of the learner. This naturally implies the necessity of a detailed comparison of the structure of a native and a target language which has been named contrastive analysis.
¹ Contrastive analysis is becoming nowadays one of the fundamental requirements in teaching foreign languages in general. See, e. g., Proceedings of the Warsaw Session of the General Assembly of the International Association of Russian Teachers held in August 1976.
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It is common knowledge that one of the major problems in the learning of the second language is the interference caused by the difference between the mother tongue of the learner and the target language. All the problems of foreign language teaching will certainly not be solved by contrastive linguistics alone. There is no doubt, however, that contrastive analysis has a part to play in evaluation of errors, in predicting typical errors and thus must be seen in connection with overall endeavours to rationalise and intensify foreign language teaching.
Linguistic scholars working in the field of applied linguistics assume that the most effective teaching materials 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.¹
They proceed from the assumption that the categories, elements, etc. on the semantic as well as on the syntactic and other levels are valid for both languages, i.e. are adopted from a possibly universal inventory. For example, linking verbs can be found in English, in French, in Russian, etc. Linking verbs having the meaning of ‘change’, ‘become’ are differently represented in each of the languages. In English, e.g., become, come, fall, get, grow, run, turn, wax, in German — werden, in French — devenir, in Russian — становиться.
The task set before the linguist is to find out which semantic and syntactic features characterise 1. the English set of verbs (cf. grow thin, get angry, fall ill, turn traitor, run dry, wax eloquent), 2. the French (Russian, German, etc.) set of verbs, 3. how the two sets compare. Cf., e.g., the English word-groups grow thin, get angry, fall ill and the Russian verbs похудеть, рассердиться, заболеть.
Contrastive analysis can be carried out at three linguistic levels: phonology, grammar (morphology and syntax) and lexis (vocabulary). In what follows we shall try to give a brief survey of contrastive analysis mainly at the level of lexis.
Contrastive analysis is applied to reveal the features of sameness and difference in the lexical meaning and the semantic structure of correlated words in different languages.
It is commonly assumed by non-linguists that all languages have vocabulary systems in which the words themselves differ in sound-form but refer to reality in the same way. From this assumption it follows that for every word in the mother tongue there is an exact equivalent in the foreign language. It is a belief which is reinforced by the small bilingual dictionaries where single word translations are often offered. Language learning however cannot be just a matter of learning to substitute a new set of labels for the familiar ones of the mother tongue.
Firstly, it should be borne in mind that though objective reality exists outside human beings and irrespective of the language they speak every language classifies reality in its own way by means of vocabulary units. In English, e.g., the word foot is used to denote the extremity of the leg. In Russian there is no exact equivalent for foot. The word нога denotes the whole leg including the foot.
¹ See, e. g., Ch. Fries. Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. University of Michigan Press, 1963, p. 9.
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Classification of the real world around us provided by the vocabulary units of our mother tongue is learned and assimilated together with our first language. Because we are used to the way in which our own language structures experience we are often inclined to think of this as the only natural way of handling things whereas in fact it is highly arbitrary. One example is provided by the words watch and clock. It would seem natural for Russian speakers to have a single word to refer to all devices that tell us what time it is; yet in English they are divided into two semantic classes depending on whether or not they are customarily portable. We also find it natural that kinship terms should reflect the difference between male and female: brother or sister, father or mother, uncle or aunt, etc. yet in English we fail to make this distinction in the case of cousin (cf. the Russian — двоюродный брат, двоюродная сестра). Contrastive analysis also brings to light what can be labelled problem pairs, i.e. the words that denote two entities in one language and correspond to two different words in another language.
Compare, for example часы in Russian and clock, watch in English, художник in Russian and artist, painter in English.
Each language contains words which cannot be translated directly from this language into another. For example, favourite examples of untranslatable German words are gemütlich (something like ‘easygoing’, ‘humbly pleasant’, ‘informal’) and Schadenfreude (‘pleasure over the fact that someone else has suffered a misfortune’). Traditional examples of untranslatable English words are sophisticated and efficient.
This is not to say that the lack of word-for-word equivalents implies also the lack of what is denoted by these words. If this were true, we would have to conclude that speakers of English never indulge in Shadenfreude and that there are no sophisticated Germans or there is no efficient industry in any country outside England or the USA.
If we abandon the primitive notion of word-for-word equivalence, we can safely assume, firstly, that anything which can be said in one language can be translated more or less accurately into another, secondly, that correlated polysemantic words of different languages are as a rule not co-extensive. Polysemantic words in all languages may denote very different types of objects and yet all the meanings are considered by the native speakers to be obviously logical extensions of the basic meaning. For example, to an Englishman it is self-evident that one should be able to use the word head to denote the following: