A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Subjects

Subject is a grammatical concept we are familiar with, and it is a very important topic of language study. Though English and Chinese subjects share certain similarities, they each have their own particular characteristics respectively, which makes the contrast between English and Chinese subjects a very challenging topic of contrastive study. Many scholars have investigated into this subject from different perspectives and have made great achievements in this field. Based on the existing studies in this field, the present thesis is to make a systematic contrast of similarities and differences between English and Chinese subjects, and tries to explain with modern linguistic theories what causes the similarities and differences, and what elements influence the practical usage of subjects in both English and Chinese.By comprehensive contrast, we have found that, English emphasizes the subject-predicate structure, and subject is a must in most English clauses. If the predicate has no semantic subject, expletive"it"or"there"will occupy the subject position. subjects usually decide the form of verbs. Agent is the typical subject in both English and Chinese clauses, however, subject is not a necessary structural element for a Chinese clause, and the semantic relation between subject and predicate is more complicated than that of English ones, because Chinese has more different forms of predicates. The requirements of verbs for subjects are very similar in both Chinese and English clauses and the main differences are typically represented in passive voice.Pragmatically, Chinese is regarded as a topic-prominent language and English a subject-prominent language, and topic-comment order is a normal argument structure in Chinese but often a marked structure in English. In both English and Chinese clauses theme, esp. the unmarked one always indicates the given information and rheme the new information. English and Chinese themes may also carry new information but only English theme can carry zero information which can not be found in Chinese. The choice of theme in Chinese clauses is freer than English one, which results in a greater variety of subjects in Chinese than that in English.The agents are usually the prototypical subjects in both English and Chinese. All types of English subjects are derivates of the prototypical agents; Chinese topics are not the prototypical but very often the periphery members in the subject category. It is argued in this thesis, that different thinking modes of English people and Chinese people are the main cause for the diversity of subjects.This thesis consists of five chapters, with Chapter One as the introduction, Chapter Two to Chapter Four the main body and Chapter Five the conclusion.Chapter One introduces the status quo, aims and problems of contrastive study of English and Chinese subjects, and the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two makes a uniform comparison between English and Chinese subjects from lexical, structural and semantic perspectives. The discussions mainly focus on the similarities and differences of word classes that can play the role of subjects, clause structure, semantic roles of subjects, and semantic relations between subjects and predicates.Chapter Three deals with the contrastive study of English and Chinese subjects from pragmatic perspectives. In this chapter, we first introduce some basic concepts of pragmatic study: topic & comment, theme & rheme, and given information & new information, then we make a contrastive study between Chinese and English subjects by analyzing the relationships between topic and subject, theme and subject.Chapter Four probes into the differences between English and Chinese subjects from cognitive perspectives. By comparison we find that different thinking modes of English people and Chinese people are the main cause for the diversity of subjects.Chapter Five summarizes the major findings of this study, points out the limitations of this study and advances some suggestions for further research.