A Contrastive Study Of Number Category Of Nouns In Chinese And English

The category of numbers is one of the fundamental categories in humanlanguages. As the names of human being, things, abstract concepts, nouns areprovided with the number concept and category. However, the number categories ofnouns are different in different languages, for example, English covers singular nounsand plural nouns, in which inflectional change makes singular nouns into plural nouns,while in Chinese, quantifier is widely used while “men” is a minority mark, besidesthem, there are other various manifestations. Through describing the manifestations,this paper tries to find out the similarities and differences of number categories inChinese and English nouns, then analyses the reason behind their difference forproviding reference for Chinese-English translation and second language acquisition,as well as teaching Chinese as a foreign language. This paper is composed of sixchapters:The first chapter is introduction that introduces the reasons of selecting this topic,research object and target, as well as research method and content.The second chapter reviews the articles about number categories of nouns inChinese and English. It includes four parts: the definition of noun and itsclassification, the definition of categories and number categories, review of thearticles about number categories of nouns in English, reviews of the articles aboutnumber categories of nouns in Chinese from the perspective of existence andinexistence of number categories, review of the articles about contrast studies ofnumber categories of nouns in Chinese and English from perspectives of quantifiercomparison and markedness theory.The third chapter describes the expression form of number categories of nouns inEnglish and Chinese, and it focuses on Chinese. The expression of English iscomposed of countable noun and uncountable noun, while Chinese quantifier,“men”and other forms of expression.The fourth chapter is the contrast of number categories of nouns betweenChinese and English. It includes the contrast of “s” and “men”, the contrast of structure of “numeral+quantifier”, and also the contrast of holistic feature of numbercategories between the two languages.The fifth chapter analyses the reasons that cause the expression differences ofnumber categories of nouns between English and Chinese from three aspects: literaltype, linguistic type and thinking pattern.The sixth chapter is conclusion, which summarizes the content of this paper,illustrates the innovative points and the research meaning, as well as points out theshortcoming of this paper and the future research direction.