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Contrastive Linguistics is a discipline closely related to comparative diachronic linguistics and linguistic typology, but limited to just one pair of languages. In this seminar, we will compare English and German – two historically related languages that are very similar in some respects but also very different at the same time. We will learn about their common history and investigate the structural properties of the two languages as they present themselves today. Besides facilitating a better understanding of the linguistic features at different levels (phonology, word-formation, phraseology, syntax, and pragmatics), this approach can also be applied in language teaching. Contrastive Linguistics can help us understand mistakes regularly found in foreign-language learning (interference, false friends), and when actively applied in schools, it can facilitate the acquisition of difficult L2 constructions. In several data sessions you will also get an opportunity to work with real language data from learner corpora and parallel text corpora, that will help you perform your own analyses.
Recommended preparatory readings
- Hawkins, John. 1986. The Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts . London and Sydney: Croom Helm.
- König, Ekkehard, and Volker Gast. 2007. Understanding English-German Contrasts. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.
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