CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS   Level of course:  MA,  2nd semester
Name of the lecturer: Christo Stamenov
Number of credits: 6                                          Number of hours 30 (lectures) + 30 (seminars)	
Teaching methods: Lectures and seminar discussions. Independent work on a small research project
	Objective of the course:  Introducing the students to the problems of contrastive linguistics and the contrastive description of English and Bulgarian	
Assessment methods: Writing a paper presenting the results of the contrastive analysis on a topic and material selected by the student
	Language of instruction:  English 

Prerequisites
Students should have knowledge of the basics in Linguistics, and a good command of English for academic and general purposes. 

Course contents
The course presents the main problems and topics of contrastive linguistics (CL): its place among the other linguistic disciplines, its relation to the theoretical and applied aspects of linguistics, highlights of the history of CL, the methodology of contrastive analysis. Some of the central issues of the contrastive description of English and Bulgarian are discussed. Due attention is paid to the achievements of the Bulgarian school in CL both in theory and linguistic description. 

Some topics to be discussed

1.	Contrastive Linguistics (CL) and its place among other linguistic disciplines
2.	Various types of contrastive studies
3.	Historical overview
4.	Basic theoretical issues:comparability, tertium comparationis, equivalence and congruence, direction of analysis	.
5.	The data of Contrastive Analysis (CA). Translation corpora. Learners’ language
6.	CL, Interlanguage and Error Analysis. The CA hypothesis – strong and weak version.
7.	CA on the phonetic/ phonological level. Pronunciation difficulties for Bulgarian learners of English.
8.	CA on the grammatical level. Some English-Bulgarian contrasts: countability and number of the noun, uses of the article, tense, aspect, transitivity, prepositions, word order.
9.	Lexical contrasts. “False friends”.
10.	Phraseological contrasts. Collocation.
11.	Contrastive word-formation
12.	Textual and discourse level CA
13.	Contrastive pragmatics. Cross-cultural CA.
14.	A. Danchev’s Expanded Model of CA.

Recommended readings
Данчев, А., Съпоставително езикознание, Унив. изд. "Св. Климент Охридски,"
	2001
Corder S. Pit, Introducing Applied Linguistics, Penguin, 1973
Corder S. Pit, Error Analysis and Intelanguage, OUP, 1,1981.
Danchev, A. (ed.), Error Analysis: Bulgarian Learners of English, Sofia, 1988
James, C., Contrastive Analysis, Longman, 1980, 1989
James, C., Errors in Language Learning and Use. Exploring Error Analysis. Longman, 
1998.
Krzeszowski, T. Contrasting Languages. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 1990
Lado, R., Linguistics Across Cultures, The University of Michigan Press, 1975
Richards, J. (ed.) Error Analysis, Longman, 1974.
Selinker, L. Rediscovering Interlanguage, Longman, 1992
Stamenov, C., Papers in English and Contrastive Linguistics, Plovdiv UP, 2001