A Comparative Study Of Spanish And Chinese Conditional Sentences

Conditional sentences can be considered a common ground throughout the world's languages.Every culture has the need to express imaginary,predictive,deductive ideas and the like,therefore every language has structures able to convey such content.Both in Spanish and Chinese linguistics,conditional sentences are an important area of research,but as of today,the comparative research in between the two languages in this particular topic is rather insufficient.To a certain extent,the considerable disparity in the nomenclature used in each system makes the comparison especially difficult.Through the methods of bibliography analysis,comparison and corpus search,this paper carries out a detailed comparison on the concept,classification,semantics and pragmatics of Spanish and Chinese conditonal sentences in order to extract their characteristics and patterns and,finally,summarize the points of convergence and divergence between the two languages.It is divided into four chapters: the first chapter is an introduction,where the background and goals of this research are discussed,as well as the theories and methods used.It also contains a summary of the prior research related to the present topic;the second chapter presents the general description of Spanish and Chinese conditional sentences,including their concept and classification,their similarities and disparities summarized at the end of the chapter;the third chapter is a semantic and syntactic comparative analysis of Spanish and Chinese conditional sentences;the fourth chapter is a comparative pragmatic analysis of Spanish and Chinese conditional sentences?This paper not only manages to fill a gap in the existing comparative research between the Spanish and the Chinese languages,but also takes one step further our knowledge on how the conditional sense is expressed in both languages as well as the particular way of thinking behind it.