За някои страни на съпоставителните изследвания (On some aspects of contrastive linguistic studies)

The author of this paper examines some of the terminological, methodological and theoretical problems of contrastive linguistics. The generative approach is considered to provide a convenient basis for contrastive analysis, especially if a common deep structure for all languages is assumed. The problem of describing or formalizing this hypothetical deep structure by means of a metalanguage can be circumvented by using one of the two or more contrasted languages as a metalanguage with respect to the other language or languages. New insights into the structure of a given language may thus be gained, because what in one language is part of the deep structure is not infrequently marked explicitly in the surface structure of another language. The case in point is the category of aspect in English and Bulgarian, which is most profitably studied by regarding it as a category of the deep structure.