A Contrastive Study On The Syntactic Characteristics Of The English And Chinese Languages And Its Significance To English Teaching

Based on the methodology of Contrastive Analysis (CA) and from the perspective of syntactic structure, an in-depth contrastive study of the syntactic characteristics of both Chinese and English languages is conducted in this thesis and efforts have been made to apply the fruit ofthis research to the explanation and solution of some mistakes——negative transfer committed frequently in their English output by the English learners, who speak Chinese as their mother tongue. Meanwhile, sufficient exemplification has been provided for the argument that CA can be considered as one of the best ways to eliminate negative transfer of the mother tongue.This thesis mainly consists of three parts.The first part deals with the conception of CA, the theories it is derived from and the different views about it found in history.In the second part, a contrast is made from the perspectives of general picture, conception of sentence and key idea of grammar, and, as a result, ten pairs of distinguishing characteristics are generalized and presented: Tree-likeness vs. Bamboo-likeness, Active vs. Passive, Stative vs. Dynamic, Abstract vs. Concrete, Personal vs. Impersonal, Hypotactic vs. Paratactic, Hidden vs. Marked, Positive vs. Negative, Precedence and Subsequence, and Complex vs. Simplex.The third part, the key part of this thesis, discusses how the ten mutually complementary pairs of distinguishing characteristics are employed to explain and deal with the negative transfers found in the output of the learners and the solutions are offered for some typical problems encountered in English teaching.Conclusion: the ten pairs of distinguishing and mutually complimentary characteristics are effective in dealing with some negative transfers.