Assoc. Prof. Dr Christo Stamenov
Lectures: 30
Seminars: 30
ECTS credits: 6
The course aims to introduce students to the main problems and topics of contrastive linguistics with a view to the analysis of English and Bulgarian. The course focuses on issues such as the place of contrastive linguistics among the other linguistic disciplines, various types of contrastive studies, comparability, equivalence and congruence, direction of the analysis, types of corpora, contrastive analysis on various levels including some problems of pragmatics and cultural differences. The approach is student-oriented and involves autonomous reading and discussion of papers by key researchers in the field. During the seminars students gain hands-on experience of contrastive analysis of parallel texts /English-Bulgarian/. In order to appreciate the practical significance of the knowledge they have acquired and develop their analytical skills, students are also required to conduct a small-scale project on a specific topic. Evaluation involves a mid-term test and a term paper produced at the end of the course. To do this course students should have competence in general linguistics and English. Students who are not native speakers of Bulgarian may compare English with another language of their own choice. The language of instruction is English.