Tertium Comparationis Revisited
XU Yu-long · Waiguoyu · 2007
Tertium comparationis (TC) is the single most important concept in Contrastive Linguistics (CL). This paper first compares the two major taxonomies of the basic types of TC proposed by Krzeszowski (1984) and Xu (1988). It then answers the criticism raised by Chesterman (1998) against using TC as the criterion for comparison. It concludes that, though still somewhat controversial, TC as a basic concept in CL is likely to be with us for a long time to come.