Thematic workshop at the 9th BICLCE, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Workshop organisers: Andrej Stopar (Ljubljana), Ivo Fabijanić (Zadar)

In its broad definition the label ‘contrastive linguistics’ refers to investigations of pairs or groups of languages with varying degrees of socio-cultural links. The approach may result in practical applications, especially in teaching or translation. Contrastive approaches to language research have also yielded a wealth of knowledge about contemporary English.

Initially the findings of contrastive studies were centred on the well-known assumption that a systematic comparison between a learner’s mother tongue and the foreign language (FL) reveals similarities and contrasts that make FL teaching more effective. But the focus of contrastive analysis on predicting learner difficulties later moved away from this didactic idea and shifted towards gaining new linguistic insights. In addition, the availability of corpora and corpus-based tools in recent decades have provided contrastive studies with new methodologies, while retaining their applicative potential, especially in translation studies.

This panel continues the long tradition of contrastive studies by addressing the relationship between English and South Slavic languages. Contributors are invited to present their theoretical and empirical research on contemporary varieties of English, in terms of their phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicology, pragmatics, stylistics, translation etc. The overall aim is to examine the contribution of such studies to linguistic knowledge about English.

Authors are invited to present and discuss:

• theoretical and/or empirical insights into English gained by means of contrastive analysis;
• contemporary, especially corpus-based, approaches to contrastive analysis focused on English;
• methodological issues related to the contrastive approaches to English (e.g., contrastive studies of traditional and contemporary methodological approaches);
• applicability of findings based on contrastive studies of English.