Learning at least one foreign language yourself, you probably
have compared your own mother tongue against the peculiarities of that foreign
language in one way or another. Curiously enough, relatively few scholars lately
choose to utilize this approach for the scientific study of English and German.
This is somewhat surprising, as the two languages are ideal candidates for such
a contrastive analysis, as they are rather closely related yet have moved apart
considerably over the course of their history.
This
course will familiarize students with a contrastive approach to linguistics,
focusing on a comparison of English and German. The goal is to identify and
explain characteristics of the English language through cross-linguistic
comparison. In doing so, we will take a tour through all major levels of
linguistic analysis ranging from discourse pragmatics to phonetics. Students
will be guided towards carrying out their own research projects. Linguistic competence in German is
not a prerequisite for this course, however an interest in the German language
is, as we will use it as the primary language for comparison.