The Problem of Acquisition of English Reflexive Pronouns by Serbian Speakers

Contrastive analysis is traditionally defined as a method which helps the analyst to ascertain in which aspects the two languages are alike and in which they differ . It includes two main processes – description and comparison, set up in four basic steps: a) assembling the data, b) formulating the description, c) supplementing the data as required, and d) formulating the contrasts . Although the term contrastive analysis is widely accepted and used, the problem of terminological diversity was very present in the relevant linguistic literature throughout the 20th century. Thus, this discipline has also been referred to as ‘parallel description’ , ‘differential studies’, ‘differential description’ , ‘dialinguistic analysis’ , ‘analytical confrontation’, ‘analytical comparison’ , ‘interlingual comparison’ , as well as ‘comparative descriptive linguistics’ , or ‘descriptive comparison’ .

In its early days in the late 1940s and 1950s, contrastive analysis was seen by many linguists primarily as a pedagogical tool. Results of the analysis – similarities and differences found between the two language systems – were thought to be able to predict the difficulties in language learning and thus be directly relevant to language teaching methodology. In practice, these predictions did not always prove to be quite precise and successful. Later empirical research tried to draw a distinction between theoretical and applied contrastive studies. Theoretical studies in this sense were close to language typology, essentially non-directional, starting from some shared or presumably universal property and looking at its manifestations in two languages , while applied studies were still of high pedagogical relevance.

Introduction – contrastive analysis 3
1 Reflexive anaphors in Serbian 5
1.1 Reflexive Pronoun 5
1.2 Reflexive Possessive Pronoun 7
1.3 Antecedents for the Reflexive Pronoun 7
1.4 Antecedents for the Possessive Reflexive 8
2 Reflexivity in english 9
3 Reflexivity and Binding Theory 12
4 Acquisition of reflexives in L2 by Serbian speakers 15
4.1 A Case Study 17
Conclusions 25
Appendices 28
References 31