A Contrastive Study Of Syntactic Structures Between English And Mongolian

This thesis,based on the Contrastive Linguistic Theory,explores the main similarities and differences in syntactic structures between English and Mongolian declaratives,interrogatives,imperatives and exclamatory sentences.English and Mongolian belong to different language families,thus their syntactic structures show more differences than similarities as follows:(?)In Mongolian declaratives,the subjects typically take a subject indicator.English has no subject indicator.The predicate stands in the second position and the auxiliary verb precedes the main verb in English declaratives.Whereas the predicate generally occurs at the end of the sentence and the auxiliary verb follows the main verb in Mongolian declaratives.The direct object and the indirect object can be shifted flexibly in declaratives and their grammatical relations can be reflected by the case marker in Mongolian.Mongolian is characterized as a language with a "pre-modifier + the head noun" word order.On the contrary,English is a language with both pre-modifier and post modifier in a noun phrase.English and Mongolian possess different word order when they are concerned with the order of two or more adverbials.(?)English interrogatives employ a subject-operator inversion,whereas Mongolian ones remain in situ in their declarative counterparts.The question word occurs at the beginning of the sentence in English interrogatives,whereas such word remains in situ position in Mongolian.When it comes to the co-occurrence of multiple question words,English fronts only one interrogative word,leaving additional ones in situ,whereas Mongolian in general,assembles them in situ or at the beginning of a sentence.The Mongolian interrogatives are formed by the addition of interrogative particles in declarative sentences,however,the corresponding elements can't be found in English.(?)When the second person pronoun serves as a subject,honorific distinctions are made in Mongolian imperatives.English imperatives are often formed by using the base form of the verb,but Mongolian imperatives are mainly expressed by applying the verb which takes a special inflectional form.(iv)When the exclamatives are marked by the interrogative pronouns,the wh-element may be put into sentence initial position in English.While in Mongolian,such words remain in situ.Besides,the ego-evidentiality is overtly realized by the sentence-final modal particles in Mongolian exclamatives.Through the detailed analysis,the main similarities in structures between English and Mongolian sentences can be summarized as below:(?)It is the common linguistic phenomenon in both languages that the subject stays initially in a simple declarative.The position of the adjuncts adverbials is relatively flexible in both English and Mongolian declaratives.(?)English and Mongolian share the same linguistic phenomenon in using the rise tone in yes-no questions.They have a set of similar question words that occur in information questions.(?)There exist some similarities in the usage of vocative in English and Mongolian imperatives.Request and overtone politeness can be often expressed by questions in the two languages.(?)Both English and Mongolian exclamatory sentences can be realized through the following features,including inversions,interrogative pronouns,degree adverbs,and interjections.It is hoped that the findings of the contrastive study will be helpful for Mongolian students to have a good command of English.Meanwhile,the contrastive study between English and Mongolian syntactic structure will benefit the English-Mongolian inter-translation and cross-cultural communication.