Contrastive linguistics attempts to find out similarities and differences in languages. Detailed comparison of the structure of a native and a target language is called contrastive analysis. The necessity of this analysis is very great for a language learner. One of major problems in learning of the second language is interference caused by the difference between the mother language of the learner and the target language. This analysis is applied to reveal the features of sameness and difference in the lexical meaning and the semantic structure of correlated words in different languages, e.g.: íîãà - foot, leg; ðóêà -arm, hand; ÷àñû - clock, watch.
English: head of a person - in Russian: ãîëîâà
of a bed èçãîëîâüå
of à ñî in ñòîðîíà
of a match ãîëîâêà
of a table ãëàâà
of an organization ãëàâà, íà÷àëüíèê
Head corresponds to different words in Russian.
Contrastive analysis on the level of the grammatical meaning reveals that correlated words in different languages may .differ in the grammatical component of the meaning, e.g. news, money, hair - in Russian they have the grammatical meaning of plurality, in English they are singular.
Another example: in Russian there is no category of definite-ness/ indefiniteness, in English this category is expressed by means of articles.
Contrastive analysis deals with idiomatic (phraseological) side of the language too.
He is a heavy smoker, - He smokes a lot;
He is a hearty eater. - He likes to eat.
In general, contrastive analysis is of paramount importance for scientists and language-learning people, as it predicts typical errors.