A Comparative Study Between Chinese And Western War Mythical Texts-a Linguistic Perspective

The study of the myths has a long history. In the west, studies and researchesconcerning myths could be traced back to ancient Greek period，and later on manyresearchers, including Grimm brothers and E.B. Tylor have put forward their ownviews from different perspectives and made great contributions to the field ofmythology; meanwhile, over centuries, lots of Chinese scholars have devotedthemselves to the study of mythology. However, after a careful retrospect of theprevious researches of mythology, it can be seen that very few of them wereconducted by means of linguistic approach. This thesis, by using linguistic methods,aims at discovering differences and similarities of ancient people’s mentalityfeatures,Chinese exegetics and western historical-and-comparative methods,Hockett’s IA model, and Halliday and Hasan’s cohesive theories, researches areconducted on three language levels, including the lexical level on which etymologicalstudy of the names of the mythical figures in war myths and the ancient people’smentality is of great importance, the sentence level on which the researches such asdifferences and similarities of the grammatical features of sentences in ancientChinese and English in the selected myths are mainly discussed, and finally thetextual level, on which cohesion and the narrative models within the selected mythsare discussed. According to the above discussions, this thesis includes the followingfindings. On one hand, both Chinese and western war myths have shared a similarnarrative mode, namely, similar role settings and story plots; on the other hand, thedifferences are tremendous as well:1) in terms of the names of the mythical figures,both Chinese and western ancient people have shared a lot of universal features of thethinking modes, namely “animism” and they both considered all these naturalphenomena including the winds, the rain, the thunders as the results of the wills andbehaviors of the gods;2) as for the sentences of the myths, on one hand, there aretremendous similarities both in the ancient Chinese language and English such as thesimilar word order, the shifts of words’ parts of speech, and the sentence patterns; onthe other hand, the way these above mentioned grammatically similar structures or language phenomena is organized is different as well;3) from the aspect of themythical texts, ancient Chinese language is mainly characteristic of being parataxisand therefore the texts of Chinese war myths are short in length without apparentlogical relations and conjunctions and it is a reader-responsibility language; English,on the contrary, primarily featured with hypotaxis, with apparent logical conjunctionswithin the texts, is a writer-responsibility language. Such differences can beexplained with the help of Chinese and western philosophical views and thinkingpatterns, in that one of the typical features of Chinese philosophy--the thought ofintegration and harmony of nature and humans and integral thinking modes has notonly to a great extent contributed to the parataxis-prominent feature of Chineselanguage, ancient Chinese language especially, but also exerted influences on Chinesemythical endings, that is, only those standing for harmony and stability, YellowEmperor as in the selected war myth, can finally become the winner; while in the west,great importance has been attached to abstraction, logics and reasoning in terms ofwestern philosophy, and therefore on one hand western language has graduallyevolved into a kind of language characteristic of being rational and abstract, and onthe other hand, as of western war myths and war process descriptions, lots ofnumbers have been used.