A Contrastive Analysis Of English Syntax And The Buyi Language Syntax & Its Application To English Syntax Teaching For The Buyi Middle School Students

Under the circumstance of globalization, English education has been increasingly implemented across China and become the important link of education in ethnic minority areas. English education provides an important window and channels for ethnic groups to understand the outside world and to broaden their view.This paper analyzes contrastively the Buyi language and English syntax from both macro-perspective and micro-perspective. In terms of micro-perspective, this paper pays attention to word order and structural features, and mainly contrasts between the Buyi language and English on word order of basic sentence patterns, position of attribute, adverbial, relative clause, subject clause, object clause, adverbial clause and inversion order. This paper also analyzes contrastively subject-predicate concord, sentence "deg" in the Buyi language and complex object in English. As to the macro-perspective, this paper focuses on the contrast of some significant features of syntactic structures, for example, overt grammar and covert grammar, personal and impersonal subjects, distribution of information. Contrastive analysis of English and the Buyi language can make learners master well the features of structures of the two languages.In order to achieve the goal of the research, this paper tries to answer the following three questions:1.What are the similarities between the Buyi language and English in syntax?2.What are the differences between the Buyi language and English in syntax?3. How do we apply the results of contrastive analysis of English and the Buyi language syntax to English teaching for the Buyi middle school students?Through the contrastive analysis, firstly, the author finds that the similarities mainly exist in word order of basic sentence patterns, postponed attributes, positions of relative clauses, and sentence "deg" in the Buyi language and structure of complex object in English. Secondly, the differences mainly exist in inversion order, prepositional attribute in English and postponed attribute in the Buyi language, subject clause, object clause, adverbial clause, requirement of subject-predicate concord in English but no such requirement in the Buyi language, overt grammar in English but covert grammar in the Buyi language. English impersonal subject and personal subject in the Buyi language, uncertain position of information focus in English and information-focus-end in the Buyi language. Besides, this paper analyzes the influences of these differences and similarities on English learning of the Buyi students. Also, these differences and similarities should be stressed by teachers so that the Buyi middle school students can make use of the positive transfer and avoid the negative transfer of their mother language, to improve their English learning effect.