A Comparison Between English And Chinese Relative Structure

The restrictive relative construction has been a hotly discussed topic in the generative literature; the two prevailing ones are the Adjunction Analysis and the Raising Analysis. Through comparison between English relative clause and Chinese relative clause and nominal head, this paper discusses the relationship between Chinese language structures. From the view of cognitive linguistics, this paper compares and analyses the relationship between two kinds of language clauses, The contrast between English and Chinese language refer to the relationship between the various characteristics, syntactic functions, structure types, and the type of English and Chinese relative clause. These analyses are help people acquaint commonness and individuality.in various clauses.Under the background of the former researches on relative structures, the thesis argues that Chinese also hosts relative constructions, though the term "relative clause" itself is rarely discussed in traditional grammar of Chinese. A comparison between relative constructions in the two languages is then carried out, centering on the issue like branching direction, restrictive and non-restrictive distinction, relative words.