A Contrastive Study On The Subjunctive Sentences Between English And Chinese

Subjunctive, which is a very important semantic category, refers to something that is incompatible with fact, imagined, subjective imagine, unreal things, behavior or so, is a relatively popular thinking activity for human being. Both English and Chinese can express subjunctive meaning by subjunctive sentences. However, there exist some differences between Chinese and English subjunctive sentences from syntactic structure and semantic relation. This thesis is to contrast the most typical subjunctive expression---subjunctive conditional sentence between English and Chinese.In addition, we try to explain the difference from the contrastive study.From structural perspective, at first, we find that some guide words,for example “if”, cannot be replaced with the subject of the clause, but Chinese can.In English, after “if”, we can only connect "S+V+O", but in Chinese,“如果”can be connected with "V+O" as well as "S+V+O". In English, if the predicate in the clause exists "were","should" or "had","if”can be canceled, and "were","should" or "had" can be moved to the front of the clause, but Chinese cannot. But Chinese has a type of special guide words which can only guide the sentence that belongs to contrary-to-fact subjunctive meaning. They are negative guide words. Besides, for English and Chinese subjunctive sentences, the main sentences cannot only be declarative sentences, but also can be interrogative, imperative or exclamation sentences.In semantic area, we mainly focus on the relation between clause and main sentence of English and Chinese subjunctive sentences. Through the study, we find out that the fundamental relation between clause and main sentence is unreal-conditional---impossible-result. Subjunctive sentences in English and Chinese own unfactual semantic feature. Besides, the main sentences own subjective feature. Besides the unreal-conditional---impossible-result relation, there are other relations between clause and main sentence of English and Chinese. As for English subjunctive sentences, clause and main sentence have the contrastive relation, explaining relation, selecting relation. However, for Chinese subjunctive sentences, according to the corpus, clause and main sentence only have contrastive relation.