Contrastive Research

                   Contrastive Research
                                             Written by Ari Julianto

      Today, I would like to post one of the research types in which the contents I have arranged the best I could do. From the word contrast we could understand that we have to find out the difference and the similarities.
      Gast (2011) defines contrastive research as an analysis that  investigates the differences between pairs (or small sets) of languages against the background of similarities and with the purpose of providing input to applied disciplines such as foreign language teaching and translation studies.
      Contrastive studies mostly deal with the comparison of languages that are ‘socio-culturally linked’, i.e. languages whose speech communities overlap in some way, typically through (natural or instructed) bilingualism.
      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,Konig & Gast (2008):
• 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 (‘positive transfer’), but differences will, due to ‘negative transfer’ (or ‘interference’). 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.

Establishing comparability
Just like linguistic typology, contrastive linguistics has to face the problem of “comparability of incommensurable systems”, Haspelmath (2008). In non-universalist frameworks (such as early structuralist linguistics and its modern successors), linguistic categories are only defined relative to the system that they form part of. Accordingly, the question arises whether categories from different linguistic systems can be compared at all, and if so, how such a comparison can be carried out. In  very general terms, comparison can be defined as the identification of similarities and differences between two or more categories along a specific (set of) dimension(s).
a. Comparison based on form: Consonant inventories
A phonological and morphophonological comparison of two languages is purely form-based insofar as it does not make reference to meaning or function. Specific aspects of phonological organization have figured prominently in (especially early) contrastive studies e.g. Lado (1957).
b. Comparison based on form and function: Temporal categories
Most parameters of comparison investigated in contrastive studies are not purely formal but concern the mapping between form and function. As is well known from typological studies, this mapping is typically (and perhaps universally) many-to-many, i.e. each ontological category can be expressed using various linguistic categories, and each linguistic category covers a certain range of functions.

c. Comparison across functional domains
As was shown in the previous section, the comparison of categories associated with specific functions (‘tense’) typically departs from an ontological category (‘temporal reference’). In specific cases several types of ontological categories (as well as their manifestations in different languages) can be described in terms of the same comparative concept. A relevant example is provided by the two phenomena of relative clause formation and Wh-question formation in English and German, Hawkins (1986).

Reference
Gast, Volker. 2011. Contrastive Linguistics: Theories and Methods.Haspelmath, 
Martin . 2008. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in cross-linguistic studies. Ms.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hawkins, John (1986). A comparative typology of English and German. Unifying the contrasts. London: Croom Helm.
Konig, Ekkehard and Volker Gast (2008). Understanding English-German Contrasts. 2nd edition (revised). Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.
Lado, Robert (1957). Linguistics across cultures: Applied linguistics for language teachers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.