A Contrastive Study Of The Syntactic Functions And Syntactic Distributions Of Prepositional Phrases In English And Mandarin Chinese

With Systemic Functional Linguistics as the macro-guide and the functional syntactic theory(the Cardiff Grammar as the main model),this study investigates the syntactic functions and syntactic distributions of English and Chinese prepositional phrases at both clause and group level from a qualitative and quantitative approach.Taking the English and Chinese versions of two novels To Kill a Mocking Bird and Fortress Besieged as an example,the study seeks to figure out the commonalities and differences of the prepositional phrases in English and Chinese novels and explore the reasons behind them.Through a contrastive analysis of statistical results,it is concluded that1)judging from the whole text,the occurrence frequency of English prepositional phrases is far higher than that of Chinese;2)in terms of the syntactic functions,there are two similarities at clausal level,that is,first,typically both Chinese and English prepositional phrases function as adverbial while atypically they serve as subject;second,when acting as subject,complement,and adverbial,they share the same statistical distribution:adverbial>complement>subject.At the group level,there are one similarity and one difference.The similarity is represented by the most atypical function:filling the completive in a prepositional phrase.The difference lies in the statistics that English prepositional phrases usually fill the modifiers of the nominal group while Chinese prepositional phrases tend to fill the finisher of the quality group in most cases;3)as for syntactic distribution,the clausal level features one commonality and three differences.Similarly in English and Chinese,when the Complement is expounded by prepositional phrases,the preposition has a higher chance of functioning as Main Verb or Predicator Extension than independent Complement.In that case,the preposition expresses the meaning of process with the Main Verb or Predicator in the clause.The three differences are:i)the typical syntactic distribution of English prepositional phrases is as adverbial,which locates behind the Main Verb in the clause,while Chinese is as adverbial,which stands between the Subject and the Predicate in the clause;ii)Chinese prepositional phrases is characterized by an atypical syntactic distribution,which is instantiated by adverbial and lies behind the Predicator of the clause;iii)there are more cases of appearing in the beginning of the clause as adverbials in Chinese than in English.At the group level,there is still one commonality and two differences.On the one hand,English and Chinese prepositional phrases,when filling the completive of prepositional phrases,stand in the same position.On the other hand,if English prepositional phrases fill the qualifiers of the nominal group,the qualifiers are behind the head,while in Chinese the modifiers lie before the head;if English prepositional phrases fill the finisher of the qualitative or quantitative groups,prepositional phrases are behind the head,while in Chinese before the head.Based on these commonalities and differences,this study explores the reasons behind them from the perspective of language epistemology,national cognition,national thinking mode and national culture.A probe into the reasons reveals that the Western Nation originates from marine civilization and the Eastern Nation farming civilization,thus resulting in the difference between their cognitive styles,that is,the western nation notices figures first and then backgrounds,but the oriental nation is opposite.This divergence of cognitive styles,in turn,leads to different national thinking modes,that is,eastern holistic thinking and western individual thinking Furthermore,the difference in Chinese and English thinking mode,in the final analysis,affects the way of language expression,which further contributes to the differences in the syntactic functions and syntactic distribution of prepositional phrases.