On Basic Principles in Contrastive Analysis

This paper describes some basic concepts in contrastive linguistics, and discusses its function in language teaching. And it compares the English proverbs containing the animal word horse with the equivalent Chinese proverbs. It aims to find the correspondence of the animal word horse in English and Chinese languages and illustrate the cultural phenomenon behind the translation. This paper finds out that the correspondence is very important and can help to understand the languages and the cultures and contribute to the teaching of language. Relevant study should be based on the cooperation and effort of both linguistics and teachers.