Contrastive linguistics is an applied science of general linguistics

which, in turn, is the study of language. It studies the

components of language and how they behave. The study
includes phonetics, the sound system; morphology, the word
structure; lexicon, the vocabulary; syntax, the sentence and
phrase structure; and semantics, the word and sentence
meaning. It also studies pragmatics, the language use in context.
Applied Linguistics is not limited to contrastive linguistics; there
are other applied sciences as well, among which is the
comparative linguistics. While comparative linguistics compares
two languages of the same origin or two dialects of the same
language, contrastive linguistics attempts to identify the
similarities and the differences between two or more languages
that come from different origins. Comparative linguistics may
compare English to German, Arabic to Hebrew, or the Old English
of Beowulf to the Middle English of Chaucer. On the other hand,
contrastive linguistics may explore English and Arabic in order to
detect the similarity and difference of their characteristics. There
is a lot in common between English and German, as well as the
Semitic languages Arabic and Hebrew. For instance, the English
"My name is..." harmonizes with the German "Mein name ist..."
and the Arabic "????" correspond to the Hebrew "khamaish".
There are more differences between English and Arabic than of
similarities; while Arabic uses definite article with abstract ...