Contrastive Analysis (= CA) In the 1940s to 1960s before the SLA field as we know it was established, Charles Fries (1945:9) wrote: "The most efficient materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner." Robert Lado, Linguistics Across Cultures, 1957: "Individuals t...

We present a new technique called contrastive principal component analysis (cPCA) that is designed to discover low-dimensional structure that is unique to a dataset, or enriched in one dataset relative to other data. The technique is a generalization of standard PCA, for the setting where multiple datasets are available – e.g. a treatment and a control group, or a mixed versus a homogeneous pop...

This article explores the contrastive function of demonstratives in two languages, Tiriyó (Cariban, northern Brazil) and Lavukaleve (Papuan isolate, Solomon Islands). The contrastive function has to a large extent been neglected in the theoretical literature on demonstrative functions, although preliminary investigations suggest that there are significant di¤erences in demonstrative use in cont...

contrastive rhetorical analysis as a way of understanding different ways through which writers from various cultural backgrounds shape their discourse was officially initiated by the works of kaplan (1966). this study tries to use the methodology to investigate the news reports in two american and iranian widely published newspapers. using the analytical methodologies of contrastive rhetoric an...

language must be studied as a social behavior and the aim of language instruction must be to facilitate learners’ acquisition of communicative competence; the ability to speak both accurately and appropriately. rules of speaking must be included into second language classroom teaching. we should teach linguistic rules along with social rules. in this study a number of social functions in persia...

We explore alternative sets in contrastive constructions and argue that different information structural units can come with different alternative sets, more specifically, the alternatives coming with (contrastive) topics can differ from the ones coming with (contrastive) foci. This is surprising for some accounts of contrastive topics (e.g. Büring 2003) and calls for an analysis of alternative...

In repeating an utterance for the benefit of a listener, talkers can use contrastive stress to mark those parts of an utterance that were misrecognized. In this study, we found that talkers use a consistent set of markers to indicate contrastive stress: Listeners unaware of the nature of the misrecognition can readily identify a contrastively stressed word. Based on an analysis of these markers...

Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on initial parsing decision. However, whether prosody functions in the same way in adult second language (L2) sentence processing is not known. In visual world eyetracking experiments, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing locally ambiguous sentences with L1 speakers (native Engli...