English and German in Contrast

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.