A Contrastive Study On Nominal Genitive Construction In English And Chinese

There is a concept which expresses "possession" both in English and in Chinese, for example,"my hand,""wo de shou", and there are also some similar aspects on grammatical expressions, such as the different components linear arrangement in surface structure and logic relations among the different components and semantic expressions in the deep structure. The previous research mainly focused on the semantic types of classification in both languages, and prototype significance research. Those could not go to analyze the reasons and rules for the expressive extension.This paper aims to make a comparative study on genitive constructions in English and Chinese with the guidance of general theory and method of the contrastive linguistics, and other linguistic theories concerned. The thesis firstly summarizes the concept of this construction, and analyzes the basic structural relationship. Based on the basic structural relationship, other types are introduced. Through the analysis on the grammatical expression in English and Chinese, we found that the essence of this construction is "subject-predicate" relationship. In the semantic relations analysis, we found that this kind of noun phrase structure can create a variety of semantic relations, and can express different semantic meanings. We also found that the same surface structure will produce different semantic meanings, and sometimes it leads to ambiguity, then we make an analysis on this phenomenon. Through the comparative study on descriptive genitive construction in Chinese and English, we found that this type of construction in Chinese has tended for the lexicalization. Finally, on the perspective of syntax, we use relevant theories to explain the ways which are used to produce extensive expressions, and on the perspective of cognition, we make a cognitive interpretation for the rules of its operation for the extensive expression.The main body of the thesis focuses on three parts:the first part states the contrastive basis according to concept and grammatical forms in both languages; the second part describes the extensive expression of semantic relationships in both languages; and the third part makes an explanation for the extension.