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Modern Contrastive Linguistics compares one pair of languages in order to detect similarities and differences between them and help in the solution of practical problems, for example in language learning or translation. 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 their structural properties as they present themselves today. Besides facilitating a better understanding of the linguistic features at different levels (phonology, morphosyntax, word-formation, phraseology, and pragmatics), this approach can also help understand mistakes regularly found in foreign-language learning (e.g., false friends), and support the acquisition of more difficult L2 constructions. This course extends and offers a different perspective on the contents acquired in the LING1 module. In several sessions students will also get an opportunity to work with real language data from learner corpora, English loanwords found in Germany, and parallel texts such as movie subtitles, that will motivate their own analyses. |
