Contrastive Linguistics Definition,

The study began in Central Europe before the Second World War and developed afterwards in North America. In the United States in the late 1950s, Robert Lado proposed contrastive analysis as a means of identifying areas of difficulty for language learners, although already in 1945 Charles Fries had formulated the theory. The earlier contrastive analysis research was language-focused. During the pre-Chomskyan structuralist period, linguists examined features of the native language which contrasted with features of the foreign language, indicating that these would be areas most likely to cause difficulty for foreign language learners. By the early 1970s, this contrastive analysis theory had been to an extent supplanted by error analysis, which examined not only the impact of transfer errors but also those related to the target language, including overgeneralization (Bowen, Madsen & Hilferty, 1985, p. 58)

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tructural linguists, though, consider this analysis theoretically impossible, because each grammatical or phonological system has to be defined in terms of the language for which it--and only it--has been developed. Transformational generative grammars assume the existence of universals, so that, in theory at least, a complete transformational grammar is already a potential contrastive analysis with other languages. As Langacker (1968) argued, in practice contrastive analyses which have tried to cover "approximately the same ground that the language teacher is called on to deal with explicitly in the classroom", have been of considerable practical value during the structural period, but lost their theoretical support once generative grammars started to be written. Fisiak (1983), however, drew our attention to the difference between the American version of contrastive analysis, which had been motivated by applied linguistics, and the earlier and continuing European tradition for the synchronic comparison of languages. Since well over a decade now, the contrastive analysis "has lost a good deal of its earlier popularity and respectability; error analysis and interlanguage studies have moved it to the fringes of practical and theor
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Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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