Contrastive Grammar as a Part of Contrastive Linguistics.

2.1. Contrastive linguistics as a science and an academic discipline: its subject matter and tasks.

The distinction between language and speech, which was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) in his book on general linguistics, has become one of the cornerstones of modern linguistics. Most generally these two notions are understood in the following way:

Language is the system, phonological, lexical, and grammatical, which lies at the base of all speaking. It is a source which every speaker and writer has to draw upon (rely on) if he/she is to be understood by other speakers of the language.

Speech, on the other hand, is the manifestation of language, or its use by various speakers and writers of the given language. Thus any material for analysis we encounter, orally or in a written form, is always a product of speech, namely something either pronounced or written by some individual speaker or writer, or a group of speakers or writers. There is no other way for a scholar to get at language than through its manifestation in speech.

The basic units of language and speech are: the phoneme, the morpheme, the word and the sentence. The definitions of these units have never been generally agreed on, yet the following can serve as some brief functional characteristics.

The phoneme is the smallest distinctive unit. The phoneme [b], for instance, is the only distinctive feature marking the difference between tale [teil] and table [teibl].

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit. Un-fail-ing-ly, for instance, contains four meaningful parts, that is four morphemes.

The word is the smallest naming unit. Though the words terror, terrible, terrific, terrify contain more than one morpheme each, they are the smallest units naming a certain feeling, certain properties and a certain action respectively.

The sentence is the smallest communication unit which expresses a complete thought or an idea. It rains is a sentence because it communicates a certain particular idea.

The units of each level can be analyzed as to their inner structure, the classes they belong to in the language system (otherwise, their paradigmaticrelations), and the combinations they form in speech (or their syntagmatic relations). In the light of all the above mentioned we shall assume that the structure of various units and the classes they form (paradigmatic relations) are the sphere of language, while the combinations the same units form in the process of communication (syntagmatic relations) are the sphere of speech.

A morpheme usually has more than one meaning. This is the case, for instance, with both the lexical and the grammatical morpheme in the word runs. The morpheme run - has the following meanings: 1) “move with quick steps” (The boy runs fast); 2) “flow” (A tear runs …); 3) “become” (to run dry); 4) “manage” (run a business); 5) “cause to move” (run a car), and many others. The meanings of the -s morpheme are as follows: 1) “present tense”; 2) “indicative mood”; 3) “third person”; 4) “singular number”; 5) “non-continuous aspect” and some others.

All the lexical meanings of the word runs, inherent in the morpheme run-, unite this word with to run, running, will run, shall run, has run, had run, is running, was running etc. into one group called a lexeme.

All the grammatical meanings of the word runs, inherent in the morpheme -s, unite this word with walks, stands, sleeps, skates lives and a great many other words into a group we shall call a grammeme. The set of grammemes represented by all the words of a lexeme is its paradigm.

Thus one may speak of lexical, grammatical and lexico-grammatical combinability, or the combinability of lexemes, grammemes and parts of speech.

Each word belonging to a certain part of speech is characterized by valency (валентність) or, in other words, the combinability of lexical units.

Any human language is characterized by three types of constitutional features: universal (pertaining to all or to the majority of languages), typological (characteristic only of a certain group of languages, creating a language type) and individual (found only in one language). To reveal the mentioned features is possible only with the help of comparison or contrasting (порівняння чи зіставлення).

The method of comparison or contrasting is not a new one and is employed as a major one by a number of linguistic disciplines, namely: the comparative-historic linguistics (порівняльно-історичне мовознавство), studying the genetic kinship of languages in their development; the areal linguistics (ареальна лінгвістика), dealing with languages of a particular geographic area despite their genetic relations with respect to their mutual influence of one language upon the other; the typological linguistics (типологічна лінгвістика), which on the basis of studying similarities and differences within languages classifies languages according to certain types; and, finally, the contrastive linguistics (зіставне мовознавство чи контрастивна лінгвістика). But the matter is that the contrastive linguistics has not yet found its final position within the system of linguistic disciplines.

Contrastive linguistics (CL) (other terms confrontative and comparative linguistics) as a language discipline was formed on the basis of typology studies in the middle of the 20-th century and has been intensively developing since 50-ies of the 20-еh century.

The aim of CL is the comparative study of two, less often more than two languages, in order to find out their similarities and differences on all levels of the language structure.

CL research of the second half of the 20-th century, especially contrastive grammar research, was enriched by works of the outstanding Ukrainian scholar Yuriy Oleksiyovych Zhluktenko (1915–1990). Yu.O.Zhluktenko is the author of a series of contrastive works of English, German, Ukrainian languages. His work “A Comparative Grammar of English and Ukrainian” (published in 1960) is to be mentioned in this regard.

Recent period in contrastive studies is marked by such an important work, concerning contrastive and typological language research, as the “Contrastive typology of the English and Ukrainian languages” by the prominent Ukrainian linguist Ilko Vakulovych Korunets’ (published in 2003). Since a lot of works in contrastive linguistics tend to be of typological character, it is obvious that the place of CL among other linguistic disciplines still should be specified. This statement can be found in the work of another outstanding Ukrainian scholar Mykhaylo Petrovych Kocherhan “Fundamentals of contrastive linguistics” (“Основи зіставного мовознавства”) published in 2006. His textbook is devoted to such issues of contrastive linguistics as: general issues of contrastive linguistics; contrastive phonetics and phonology; contrastive derivatology and grammar; contrastive lexicology and phraseology. In the textbook M.P. Kocherhan presents his understanding of contrastive linguistics as a discipline on the modern stage of linguistic theory development, namely:

Contrastive linguistics (confrontative linguistics) is a branch of linguistics which studies two or more languages irrespective of their kinship with the aim of reveaing their similarities and differences on all levels of the language structure (phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical-semantic).

According to M.P. Kocherhan, the object of contrastive linguistics are any two or more languages irrespective of their genealogical and typological nature.

As far as the number of languages to be contrasted is concerned, the majority of linguists are oriented towards two languages though recently there have been appearing a lot of works devoted to the study of three and even bigger number of languages. This statement is proved by professor A.E. Levytsky, another prominent Ukrainian linguist, who in his recent research on “Comparative grammar of English and Ukrainian languages” (published in 2008) considers the object of the Comparative linguistic investigations as a comparison of two or more linguistic systems at the synchronous level. Furthermore, the general target of comparative linguistics, according to A.E. Levytsky (preferring the term “comparative linguistics” to the term “contrastive linguistics”), is to establish the most essential convergences and divergences in the languages of the world, their classification, systematization and, as the result, the elaboration of recommendations as to the mastering of a language.

– to reveal similarities and differences in languages, the coincidence and difference by usage of language means of expression;

The practical (linguo-didactic) tasks of contrastive linguistics are the following:

– to define the methodological relevance of similarities and differences between the contrasted languages;

– to outline the frames of the application of comparison as a way to teach a foreign language;

– to work out the procedure of the cross-language contrasting as a means to teach a foreign language.

Contrastive grammar (CG) of English and Ukrainian languages, being part of contrastive linguistics, has as its object the grammar structure of these two contrasted languages. The subject matter of contrastive grammar are the peculiarities of expression of the main grammatical categories and syntactic structures in both contrasted languages.

Therefore, one of the most important notions of CG is the notion of grammatical category. The grammatical category is the system of opposed to each other rows of grammatical forms with homogeneous (однорідний) meanings, for example the grammatical category of case, gender etc. The number of grammatical categories can vary from language to language and depends on the language type.

Contrastive research is carried out with the help of several methods. Thus, comparing of isomorphic features can very often be performed with the help of the deductive and the inductive methods. The immediate constituents method (the IC’s) and the transformational method are also often employed in contrastive studies. Though contrastive linguistics has elaborated its own method of research: the method of contrastive analysis which is the totality of the ways of language research and description with the help of its systematic comparison with another language with the aim to reveal its peculiarities on the background of common features.

The effectiveness of the contrastive analysis depends on the well-chosen etalon (the basis for comparison, the common denominator), on the basis of which the realization of a certain characteristic feature is defined. As a basis for comparison (or tertium comparatioinis) one can use various means: a specifically constructed artificial language; a certain separate language with a well-developed system; a certain system; linguistic (grammatical, semantic, etc.) category; certain differential characteristics; a certain grammatical rule; a certain semantic field; phonetic, morphological, syntactic and other models; a certain method; the interlingua by translation; the typological category, etc.

The grammatical structure of the English and Ukrainian languages has naturally a lot of differences. The Ukrainian language, as well as other eastern Slavonic languages (Russian and Byelorussian) has the typical flexional (флективний)/ synthetic (синтетичний) grammatical structure.

The English language vice versa has mainly analytical structure, at which the grammatical function of a word and its connection with other words are expressed with the help of special formal, or functional words (службове слово) (prepositions, auxiliary words etc.) and the word order.

Parts of speech. The English and Ukrainian languages basically have a similar system of parts of speech. In both languages we can find the following parts of speech: 1) noun (іменник); 2) adjective (прикметник); 3) numeral (числівник); 4) pronoun (займенник); 5) verb (дієслово); 6) adverb (прислівник); 7) modal words (модальні слова), 8) preposition (прийменник); 9) conjunction (сполучник), 10) particle (частка); 11) interjection (вигук).

The distinctive feature of the English language in comparison with the Ukrainian language is the availability of such a part of speech as article, that is the 12-th part of speech.

A part of speech is a word or a class of words linguistically representing phenomena and relationships of the objective reality (including man and the products of his mind) in a specific way (as substances, properties, changes etc.) Thus the general meaning of a part of speech is neither lexical nor grammatical, but it is connected with both, and we call it lexico-grammatical meaning.

A part of speech is also characterized by its grammatical categories manifested in the opposemes and paradigms of its lexemes. Parts of speech are said to be characterized also by their function in a sentence.

Another important feature of a part of speech is its combinability, that is the ability to form certain combinations of words. Combinability is the power of a lexico-grammatical class of words to form combinations of definite patterns with words of certain classes irrespective of their lexical or grammatical meanings.

Thus, a part of speech is a class of lexemes characterized by:
1) its lexico-grammatical meaning, 2) its lexico-grammatical morphemes (stem-building elements), 3) its grammatical categories or its paradigms, 4) its combinability, and 5) its functions in a sentence.

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