Contrastive Studies On English And Chinese Syntactic Structure

Making contrast is a very important method to know and understand theworld and also one of the basic approaches to conduct language research andstudy. Mr. Chao Yuanren, the well known Chinese linguists, once said:" Whatso-called linguistic theory, in fact, is making contrast between differentlanguages, a scientific research finding by a synthetically contrastive analysisof languages of various nationalities in the world." In China contrastive studyis a comparatively new branch of linguistics. However, recent years havewitnessed its rapid development and tremendous achievements as the result ofthe efforts of researchers. Contrastive study reveals similarities of anddissimilarities between the two languages and suggests the dialecticapproaches to language study. A contrastive study of different languages not only helps to form a newmethod, which can be applied in language teaching and translation but alsobenefits the interlingual communication. By contrastive study, languagelearners can gain a better insight of peculiarities of their mother language andthe foreign language. In the process of communication, it is possible for themto be conscious of the similarities of and dissimilarities between differentlanguages in order to avoid committing mistakes, thus making interlingualcommunication possible. In the process of English learning, the difference between English andChinese syntactic structure, one of the major difficulties, often puzzles mostChinese students, for different peoples have different ways of thought whichlead to different habitual expressions. This dissertation focuses on contrastivestudy of syntactic structure of English and Chinese with the purpose to explorethe similarities and particularly dissimilarities between these two unrelatedlanguages. It is hoped that through contrastive study it will be easier forChinese students to get a better command of English; and what is moreimportant, to improve their competence and performance in that language. The paper offers an introduction to contrastive study on English andChinese syntactic structure and can be divided into six chapters. Chapter one isan introduction to the definition of contrastive linguistics and comparativelinguistics, origin, development and achievements in English and Chinesecontrastive study together with a few famous scholars'research findings in thisfield. Chapter two presents a brief contrast of macroscopic English andChinese syntactic features. Chapter three to five give a much detailed contrastand comparison on microscopic English and Chinese syntacticstructure—basic sentence patterns, English compound sentence, complexsentence, compound complex sentence in comparison with Chinese Fuju,sentence constitute elements and word order. In the end, a conclusion ispresented in Chapter six.