Contrastive Analysis of Various Speech Acts Events in English and Bangla

Abstract

In the early years (i.e. the 1950s through the 1970s), the contrastive analysis was limited only in the grammatical structure and phonology. At present, more effort is given on speech acts and its behavior. Contrastive analysis is based on similarities and dissimilarities between two or more languages. Crystal (1992) has defined contrastive analysis or contrastive linguistics as the identification of points of structural similarity and difference between two languages. Speech acts mean a minimal functional unit in human communication. According to Green (2009), ‘speech acts are staple of everyday communicative life’. Generally, we perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "please" to perform a request, or several words or sentences: "Please help me." In this paper, the main focus is highlighting the contrastive analysis of various speech acts events in English and Bangla with regard to range, frequency, structure, formality, and politeness etc.