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I deal with the problems of contrastive theolinguistics, get acquainted with the works of colleagues available for reading. I would be grateful if you would point to scientific works in this area and / or provide an opportunity to familiarize yourself with them. I invite colleagues interested in contrastive theolinguistics to cooperate.
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Thank you very much!
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contrastive Linguistics  is a course of graduate level. Usually some theories and practice are combined. Are there any new ways to refresh the students in the classroom?
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Check the following reference Please.. it might's assist you in your question …
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Dear Colleagues,
I am wondering whether it is possible to come up with a VERY simplified (yet reasonable) classification of the world's languages based on linguistic distance. Such a classification would be helpful for non-linguistic researchers who conduct studies on clinical bi- and multilingual populations. Currently, linguistic distance is typically not accounted for in such studies. 
Since most clinical neuroscientific research has beed conducted on European languages, I was thinking of a 3 step distance: (1) close, (2) moderate and (4) distant using German as an example. Here is a sample description for a non-linguist researcher:
"There are a few major language families in the world, including, e.g., the Indo-European language family (the largest, about 50% of the world's languages) and the Austronesian (about 5%). For example, German and Tongan are linguistically distant because they belong to separate major language families. German and Spanish are moderately close. They both belong to the Indo-European language family but they have separate sub-branches of language families: German is a Germanic language and Spanish is a Romance language. Finally, German and English are close because they are both Indo-European and they both belong to the Germanic family."
The description is merely a draft and I realize that it has numerous oversimplifications (which may not seem acceptable). Yet, I am posting it here and I am kindly asking for your feedback. 
Alternatively, perhaps there is an existing source that is readily available and non-linguist friendly.
Thank you!
Pleasant regards,
Monika
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Linguistic relatedness is defined by shared ancestry, not by synchronically measured distance. Of course (some) distance metrics may be correlated with the degree of relatedness, since the older the last common ancestor of languages A and B, the more independent innovations are likely to have accumulated in either lineage over time, increasing the difference between them -- although it has to be kept in mind that the rate at which innovations arise and get fixed is anything but uniform. There is, however, no simple algorithm for computing the structure of the family tree, given just the measured distances.
Note, by the way, that:
  1. The Indo-European family contains perhaps about 6% of the world's languages. The exact figure may be debated but it certainly isn't anywhere close to 50%.
  2. The Austronesian family is about three times larger than Indo-European (about 1200 languages, i.e. about 17% of the world's total). There are actually quite a few families larger than Indo-European, and if by "major" you mean "containing more than ca. 100 members", there are about a dozen "major language families" in this sense.
  3. Families are defined by the current state of our knowledge about language relatedness. If A, B and C (say, English, Tongan and Quechua) are assigned to three different families, this is because we can't state anything sensible abouit their hypothetical common ancestor and we can't even demonstrate that they are genetically related in the first place (given what we know at present).
Every method has its limit of reasonable application. Even for "unrelated" languages measurements of "distance" (no matter how defined) are certain to yield some values, which will however be random noise, not genetic information. They will not tell us whether English is more closely related to Tongan or to Quechua, or whether Quechua and Tongan cluster together to the exclusion of English. 
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Dear Members, I want to make a corpus of affective norms for Hindi like has been made for English norms. There are many corpus for English words but I didn't find any good resource for Hindi. If anyone has any idea about such good resources please share the information about it.
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these corpus are available on Hindi-
1 Training corpus
Indian parallel corpora (39000 English Hindi parallel sentences)
Gyan  Nidhi corpus  (195165 words in English,202199 words in Hindi)
2 Tuning corpus
Gyan  Nidhi Tuning corpus (1000 sentences)
3 Testing corpus
 Joshua Indian parallel  corpora test set  (1000 sentences)
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In Basque when you say "five euros" you do not add the plural morpheme to the noun which follows the number, thus you say "bost euroØ" (i.e. five euro). In questions when you are asking the quantity, you do not need any plural marking either, e.g. "Zenbat etxeØ dago?" (i.e. "How many apple?"). I would like to know what languages share the same characteristics with Basque.
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A very interesting angle in these languages since in the context of many African languages. the plural form is attached to many other lexical items that go with the noun.
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I'm doing research on contrastive analysis. My intrest is contrastive studies of rhetorical devices between English and Chinese. I need some supportive materials like the latest books or articles. Can anyone give me any help? 
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Hello Ronglan, 
concepts such as ''  approximative system, interim grammar, idiosyncratic dialect , and
developing grammar are also  intimately related to  CA.  
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A sentence of a tonal language presents critical lexical information in the tones whereas a nontonal language such as English does not. What might be a way of developing useful statistics that measure and show this difference? In other words, how much of the information content is in the tones?
  • E.G. let us say English is 100% nontonal and Mandarin can be shown to be 60% nontonal and 40% tonal [I do not really know what the statistics would be].
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What I'm trying to do is to compare linguistically the text of constitutional law from some different countries. In order to facilitate this analysis, I need some databases or tools which contain German and English corpora, annotated by tags and parsings. I would also appreciate if anybody suggest me identical researches. Thank you.
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This is a very interesting request. Try visiting following web sites, I hope you'll find them useful.
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The feedback I got on the question of the differences between Comparative Linguistics and contrastive  Linguistics triggered this question on the differences between contrastive Linguistics and contrastive analysis, or are they the same? I'm waiting for expert feedback!
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Contrastive analysis is a linguistic and psychological approach to SLA, based on stfucturalism in linguistics and behaviorism in psychology. Its aim is pedagogical and is somehow outdated. Contrastive linguistics is a discipline of its own which has several aims and different approaches. Contrastive linguistics is NOT an approach to SLA though its findings usually have some pedagogical goals.  
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The literature online is very confusing!
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Yes, there is a neat difference:
1. Comparative linguistics makes a synchronic and diachronic comparison between two languages which are "genetically" similar;
2. Contrastive linguistics contrasts the structures of two languages in order to pick all the relevant differences.
Hope this helps?
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It is believed that in the progress of learning and teaching a foreign language, CA cannot be omitted. CA although is old, is still relevant in assisting language teachers with their teaching methods and techniques. The differences assist the learners get through the similarities and discrepancies between his mother tongue and the target language in order to enhance his knowledge. What do you think of contrasting and comparing two or more languages in terms of morphology and phonology for EFL and ESL learning and teaching?
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Dear Bahram Kazemian
It is a good question. I would like to draw you attention to the fact that there are numerous studies that show the effectiveness of the contrastive analysis hypothesis . According to these studies, the knowledge about the kinds and degree of differences and similarities between languages on a number of linguistic levels helps in the process of predicting possible difficulties faced by L2 learners. From the pedagogical perspective, CA helps students to see clearly some of the problems they might face. They may avoid making interlingual errors if they are completely aware of the possible difficult areas. CA provides an access for EFL/ESL teachers to diagnose their students' errors. Teachers may not expect students' errors in advance, but at least they can have the ability to explain or diagnose students' errors through CA. Identification of differences and similarities between languages might have a great contribution to the linguistic theory.
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Nein, davon ist mir nichts bekannt; dies scheint mir sehr unwahrscheinlich. Es kursieren verschiedenartige Informationen darüber, ob - und wenn ja, wie - es in den USA Abstimmungen gegeben hat, nach denen sich die Einwohner zwischen dem Englischen und dem Deutschen entscheiden sollten, teils auf der Bundesstaaten-, teils auf nationaler Ebene. Diese Informationen widersprechen sich teils erheblich, das Internet ist voll davon. Mit der Glaubwürdigkeit hinsichtlich solcher Einlassungen wäre ich sehr vorsichtig.