Contrastive analysis. The dialectic of equality and difference

Abstract

The contrastive method compares two or more elements, categories or structures within the same language or interlinguistically, identifying similarities and differences to establish complementarity relationships as a basis for their integration into more comprehensive and abstract schemes that account for the functional constancy in the structural variation. In the history of linguistics a model based on a particular language has often been used to describe the structure of other languages. The same has happened in the ontogenetic and pedagogical domains. The contrastive analysis helps to lay the foundations for an off-centered description that reconciles structural variation with functional constancy. The results of the contrastive analysis must be the basis of typology, and at the universalistic level typological variation must be integrated into more general schemes called operations. The four descriptive levels interact in a inductive deductive circle, forming an integrated program.

Keywords

• Contrastive, variation, continuum, genders, noun classes, articles, relative lauses, operations.