ON METALINGUISTIC LABELLING IN ENGLISH-SERBIAN CONTRASTIVE STUDIES

Abstract

The paper provides an overview of current issues concerning the metalinguistic inventory used in contrastive investigations of contemporary English and Serbian. Modern contrastive linguistics (CL) has largely shifted its methodological focus from the elaboration of theoretical prerequisites towards matters connected with the electronic processing of large amounts of linguistic data. Consequently, a need to revisit the problems of terminological discrepancies found in different frameworks used for the description of the compared languages is deemed appropriate. Problems arise on at least four levels: 1. restrictions imposed by the structure of the two languages compared; 2. the model-specific use of particular terms; 3. a semantically associative, but potentially misleading interpretative potential of linguistic terms; 4. the inconsistent or underspecified use of the metalinguistic units pertaining to a particular level of linguistic analysis or respective linguistic traditions. Having investigated the observed pitfalls, a conclusion about the necessity for a more precise determination of CL metalinguistic apparatus and a possible meeting ground to overcome the obstacles by means of corpus linguistics is presented.