PDF Studies in Contrastive Linguistics Download
- Author: Cristina Mourón Figueroa
- Publisher: Univ Santiago de Compostela
- ISBN: 9788497506489
- Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
- Languages : es
- Pages : 1112
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Contrastive Linguistics, roughly defined as a subdiscipline of linguistics which is concerned with the comparison of two or more (subsystems of) languages, has long been associated primarily with language teaching. Apart from this applied aspect, however, it also has a strong theoretical purpose, contributing to our understanding of language typology and language universals. Issues in theoretical CL, which also feature in this volume, are the choice of model, the notions of equivalence and contrast, and directionality of descriptions. Languages used for illustration in this volume include English, German, Danish, and Polish.
Contrastive Linguistics, like other linguistic disciplines, is becoming more and more data-oriented, relying increasingly on the statistical analysis of corpus data to reveal and investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between languages. This title illustrates this trend with a representative sample of contrastive linguistic case studies.
Contrastive Linguistics is the first book written by a linguist from mainland China on the histories and principles of comparing and contrasting Chinese and Western languages, specifically English. From Wilhelm von Humboldt's initial study in comparative linguistics to the present day, traditional scholarship in contrastive linguistics has taken a Western perspective and shown how foreign languages relate to the Indo-European language family. However, such a view has a limited scope, and there is an alternative history to contrastive linguistics. This book is an attempt by Professor Wenguo Pan to redress the balance in contrastive linguistics, comparing Western languages to Chinese, rather than vice versa. He provides a survey of contrastive linguistics in China throughtout the past century, and aims to open a window for the world to see what the new generations of Chinese linguists are doing in this exciting field, and to start a dialogue between scholars of different backgrounds and linguistic traditions. Contrastive Linguistics looks at the history of this discipline both in Europe and in China. Professor Pan presents a survey of the historical, philosophical and methodological foundations of the discipline, but also examines its scope in relation to general, comparative, anthropological and applied linguistics. This book will be of interest to academics interested in a new perspective on contrastive linguistics or Chinese linguistics.
This book examines the contribution of various recent developments in linguistics to contrastive analysis. The articles range across a broad gamut of languages, with most attention going to the languages of Europe. They show how advances in theory and computer technology are together impacting the field of contrastive linguistics. Part I focuses, from a broadly functional-cognitive viewpoint, on the close link with typology, stressing the importance of embedding the treatment of grammatical categories in their contexts of use. Part II turns to methodological issues, exploring the enormous potential offered by parallel, computer-accessible corpora to contrastive linguistics and to enhancing the testability, authenticity and empirical adequacy of cross-linguistic studies. Part III is concerned with contrastive semantics, ranging from individual items to entire grammatical constructions, and shows how meanings are coupled to language-specific cognitive strategies and even to cultural differences in subjective awareness and the fashioning of personal identity.