A Study Of The Syntactic Structure Of Chinese “he (和)” And English “and/with” From The Perspective Of Mental Scanning

Modern Chinese and English belong to different language systems,so they have different characteristics.Function word,an important part of speech in Chinese and English,is regarded as a significant research object.As a frequently-used function word in Chinese,“he”(和)has been researched by scholars from different perspectives,such as its grammaticalization,meaning,part of speech,syntactic constituent and comparative analysis.A series of previous comparative studies have been conducted to compare Chinese “he” and its English equivalents “and/with” form the perspective of meaning and function.Since most comparative studies are concerned about comparison of meaning or function,this paper chooses the perspective of syntactic structure to compare the three words(“he”,“and”,“with”).First of all,this paper tries to find out the same meaning between “he” and “and/with” respectively based on an analysis of their semantics.Secondly,the paper makes a comparative analysis of their syntactic structure under the same meaning to find out the difference of the Chinese and English structure.Finally,it tries to provide an explanation of their syntactic structure from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics.2000 samples are collected from a Chinese corpus,BLCU Corpus Center(BCC),and an English corpus,British National Corpus(BNC).Data collected are scrutinized and analyzed in a mixed approach,a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods.Research questions in this study are addressed:(1)what is the same meaning between “he” and “and/with”?(2)what are their syntactic structures under the same meaning?(3)which kind of mental scanning is applied to construe these structures?Through the analysis,this paper arrives at the following research findings:(1)In terms of “he” and “and”,both of them can be used to coordinate two elements to express meaning “both…and”.As for “he” and “with”,they can be used to introduce the other actor to express meaning “in company with”,to introduce an object in a comparison to express meaning “compare with”,and to introduce an object related to another one to express meaning “be related to”.(2)When “he” and “and” are used in a coordination,the Chinese structure is “A +he + B + VP” and the English one is “A + and + B + VP”;when “he” and “with” are used to introduce the other actor,the Chinese structure is still “A + he + B + VP” and the English one is “A + VP + with + B”.One Chinese structure “A + he + B + VP” can correspond to two English structures,“A + and + B + VP” and “A + VP + with + B”.(3)Both summary and sequential scanning are applied in the construal of Chinese structure “A + he + B + VP”.Summary scanning is applied when “he” is used as a conjunction while sequential scanning is applied when “he” is used as a preposition.As for the two English structures,summary scanning is used in structure “A + and + B +VP”,and sequential scanning is used to construe structure “A + VP + with + B”.Firstly,this thesis makes a supplement to the research of function word,especially to comparative studies on their syntactic structure.Secondly,a comparison of Chinese and English function word to some extent benefits those teaching and learning Chinese or English.