Languages in Contrast - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2012

After receiving enthusiastic support during the 1960s and 1970s, the program of ‘Contrastive linguistics’ led a somewhat modest, if not marginal, existence during the two subsequent decades. The main reason for the apparent failure of this program was, of course, that the high hopes seen in its potential for making foreign language teaching more efficient were disappointed. Empirical work on the process of L2-acquisition from different native languages as starting points showed that contrastive linguistics cannot simply be equated with a theory of foreign language acquisition. A second problem was that a central aspect of the contrastive program, i.e. the writing of comprehensive contrastive grammars for language pairs, was hardly ever properly implemented. Finally, there was the problem of finding a place for contrastive linguistics within the spectrum of language comparison, relative to other comparative approaches to linguistic analysis. It is the third of these issues that is addressed by the present article. It will be shown that only by relating contrastive linguistics to other subfields of comparative linguistics and by delimiting it from them will we obtain a clear picture of its agenda, its potential and its limits.

Contrastive linguistic studies have focused almost exclusively on contrasting the synchronic grammars of modern standard language varieties. There may be some merit in expanding the scope of the enterprise to include contrastive investigations of grammatical systems with respect to how they change over time. Full understanding of some contrasts between grammars requires reference to the diachronic axis. This paper illustrates the point with one particular case in the Germanic languages, involving parallel instances of reanalysis of relative pronouns as relative complementizers in Yiddish, Afrikaans and Gothic. These parallel changes, operating on grammatical systems with slight differences in initial conditions, yield sharply different outcomes.

This article deals with a very general problem, namely the origin of the well-known distinction between dialectal and typological variation. It is argued that the fact that the possible grammatical choices are more restricted within a dialectal domain is not due to a supposed principled difference in the parameters that rule variation. Rather, they are a function of the originally unitary lexicon dialects share. If language variation is essentially located in the functional items, and they are derived from the same lexicon, then they will share some core properties that make dialectal variation so restricted. I propose that the fact that the lexicon is similar can give us clues about the internal structure of syntactically complex elements which are represented by a single word, like quantifiers, wh-items, modal verbs, etc. Within a homogenous domain, structural complexity correlates with a higher number of lexical roots: the higher the number of the lexical roots found, the more complex internal structure the functional item will display.

The paper looks back at Hawkins (1986), A comparative typology of English and German, and shows, on the basis of raising and human impersonal pronouns in English, Dutch and German, that contrastive linguistics can be viewed as a pilot study in typology. It also pleads for doing the contrastive linguistics of three languages rather than of two, not least because the third language can teach us something about the other two.