What is "contrastive"

a. contrasting

1. adj. of words so related that one contrasts with the other; "`rich' and `hard-up' are contrastive terms" [syn: incompatible]

2. strikingly different; tending to contrast; "contrasting (or contrastive) colors" [syn: contrasting]

3. syntactically establishing a relationship of contrast between sentences or elements of a sentence; "disjunctive conjunctions like `but', `or', or `though' serve a contrastive function"

Contrastive may refer to one of several concepts in linguistics:

• Contrast (linguistics)
• Contrastive linguistics
• Contrastive distribution
• Contrastive analysis
• Contrastive rhetoric
• Contrastive focus reduplication
• Contrastive stress
• Contrastive wa; see Japanese grammar
• Contrastive units, a basic unit of sound
  • Chroneme
  • Phoneme