Course work

Comparative and contrastive analysis involves the systematic comparison of two or more philogenically-related and non-related languages with the aim of finding the similarities and differences between or among them. The term ‘comparative’ was first used by Sir William Jones in 1786, in a speech at the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta, India. In his speech, he compared Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic and pointed out that some words shared similarities. “The comparative method is a technique of linguistic analysis that compares lists of related words in a selection of languages” (Denham & Lobeck, 2011, p.361). This method also helps individuals study the structure of a target language by comparing it to the structure of their native language. Specialists in the field of applied linguistics believe that the most effective teaching materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the target language, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner (Fries, 1957). The contrastive analysis is the prediction that a contrastive analysis of structural differences between two or more languages will allow individuals to identify areas of contrast and predict where there will be some difficulty and errors on the part of a second-language learner. The method helps to predict and explain difficulties individuals may experience while learning a second language.
The second approach is statistical, or quantitative. It has originated mainly from “the field of psychology where there has been heavy emphasis on the use of statistics to make generalizations from samples to populations” (Perry, 2011, p. 79). A quantitative method is used to represent data in numbers; it is a study that uses numerical data with emphasis on statistics to answer the research questions. A quantitative method differs from a qualitative method. Qualitative research does not highlight statistical data. It is a research done in “a natural setting, involving intensive holistic data collection through observation at a very close personal level without the influence of prior theory and contains mostly verbal analysis” (Perry, 2011, p. 257). A qualitative method may be used in case studies and discourse analysis.
+The term immediate constituents (IC) was first used by Leonard Bloomfield in his book, Language. “The principle of immediate constituents leads us to observe the structural order, which may differ from their actual sequence” (Bloomfield, 1935, p. 210). Ginzburg et al. (1979) further develop the theory of immediate constituents, and they try to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one another. For example, the phrase effective use of published research for practical purposes in educational settings may be divided into the following successive layers – immediate constituents, which in turn are subdivided into further immediate constituents:

The next stage after observation is c l a s s i f i c a t i o n or orderly arrangement of the data obtained through observation. For example, it is observed that in English nouns the suffixal morpheme -er is added to verbal stems (speak + -er, writ(e) + - er, etc.), noun stem‘s (village + -er, London + -er, etc.), and that -er also occurs in non-derived words such as mother, father, etc. Accordingly all the nouns in -er may be classified into two types — derived and simple words and the derived words may be subdivided into two groups according to their stems. It should be pointed out that at this stage the application of different methods of analysis is common practice.¹
In the distributional analysis and co-occurrence, the term ‘distribution’ means “the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of the same level (words relative to words / morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.) (1979, p. 246). Lexemes occupy certain positions in a sentence, and if words are polysemous, they realize their meanings in the context, in different distributional patterns; for example, compare the verb chase in the phrases chase around after someone (to seek someone or something in different places), chase after someone or something (to pursue or hunt for someone), chase someone or something away from some place (to drive someone or something out of some place), chase someone or something down (to track down and seize someone or something), chase someone in(to) some place (to drive someone or some creature into a place), and chase someone and something up (to seek someone or something out; to look high and low for someone or something. So, the term ‘distribution’ is “the aptness of a word in one of its meanings to collocate or to co-occur with a certain group, or certain groups of words having some common semantic component” (1979, p. 249). V. Fromkin, R. Rodman, N. Hyams, and K. M. Hummel (2010) term this analysis as collocation analysis when the presence of one word in the text affects the occurrence of other words, so a collocation is “the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a corpus” (p.432).