A Comparative Study Of Word Order In Chinese And English-from The Perspective Of Contrastive Linguistics

Contrastive linguistics is a branch in modern linguistics. The comparison of languagesis often conducted in aspects of grammar, pronunciation, semantics and pragmatics.Contrastive linguistics is a contrasting description between two different languages andmainly adopted synchronic studies in contrastive linguistics.There are many differences between English and Chinese. English belongs to theIndo-European family whose typical characters are the morphological changes and thegrammatical expressive means by word order. At the same time, Chinese belongs to theSino-Tibetan language family. One of its characters is the usage of word order to expressdifferent grammatical meanings which are not strict enough. Therefore, the study of wordorder in both English and Chinese is very important.These differences are mainly reflected in the sound system, writing system, grammarsystem and respective cultural matrix and so on. Word order is one of the grammaticaldevice means and is also an important and necessary component in Chinese and English.Although there are some similarities between the two languages, the differences are muchmore conspicuous. Judging from the macroscopic view, English presents more charactersin synthesis and hypothesis which are typically reflected as the different naming of “treestructure” in English and “bamboo structure” in Chinese. At the same time, judging fromthe microscopic angle, English is a subject-prominent language but Chinese is atopic-prominent language; the linear sentential extension direction of English is from left toright but the one of Chinese is from right to left; there are classification of inversions inEnglish but the main form of inversion in Chinese are for emphasis; English and Chinesehas different rigidities in different sentential occasions. What is more, special cases of wordorder are analyzed from the cases of the subjectless sentence, inverted sentence and thecleft sentence in order to provide more powerful evidence of this research. Therefore, intranslation, according to the differences and commonality in both languages the translatorscan use more flexible form can be adopted in order to save time and make the context morefluent.Through contrastive study of word order in English and Chinese, the author hopes to draw a detailed picture of the comparison between word order in these two languages andpresent vivid and lucid clues for the readers, in order to help them have a betterunderstanding of the differences and similarities and then use these two languagescorrectly.