A Contrastive Study Of The Passive Constructions Of Chinese And English

With the achievements of contrastive linguistics as the theoretical basis, this thesis explores the passive constructions of both Chinese and English within the framework of the researches in the relationship between language and thought. Through a contrastive analysis of thinking modes and syntactic characteristics, we try to show that the differences existing in the two passive constructions are far more than the heterologous forms at the surface syntactic level. As a matter of fact, they are closely related to the dissimilarities in the culture, philosophy and cognition of Chinese and Western people. In other words, the distinctive feature in the cognition and mode of thinking of a certain people is the reflection of their belief in philosophy and their characteristic culture and leads to the heterology in its linguistic system. Traditional Chinese people believe in oneness of man and nature and advocate holism. They tend to analyse things from a unitary perspective and interpret the physical world in a holistic mode. Contrarily, Western people take an objective attitude towards the world and advocate dividedness between man and nature. They rely much on logic and reasoning rather than intuition, which have led them to a logic and analytic thinking mode that lays emphasis on each individual element of an entity. The disparity between the different philosophies and modes of thinking of the Chinese as well as the Western people has exerted great influence on the two corresponding linguistic systems. Syntactically speaking, Chinese is a paratactic, personal, topic-prominent and dynamic language while English is strikingly different for being hypotactic, impersonal, subject-prominent and static. All these distinctive features are well illustrated by the passive constructions of Chinese and English but often neglected in most of the existing teaching materials for the foreign language learners. It is with the aim to provide them with a thorough and complete explanation of the heterology of the two passive constructions that we made this contrastive study, and we also hope that it will be helpful to the translators and foreign language teachers as well.