Abstract:

 By examining polysemy in English and Chinese, the paper reveals a tendency of exaggerating language differences in current contrastive studies. Such a biased approach could be largely attributed to the failure in adopting equal standards for evaluating different languages, which in turn leads to undue focus on semantic precision of one language over another in particular cases and overgeneralization of parametric differences. It is therefore argued that a contrastive study should follow a holistic and balanced approach to language phenomena, rather than drawing sweeping conclusions based on particular cases.

Key words: contrastive analysis, principles, problems, meaning