A Comparative Analysis Of Word Order Between Chinese And Swedish And The Application Of Teaching Chinese To Swedish Learners

By the effect of Chinese language becomes more and more popular all over the word, teaching Chinese from a country-specific perspective has become one of the important targets for the academy of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Sweden is the first Northern European country offering Chinese course and has been developing Chinese language education for more than80years since the1930s.Unfortunately, by far studies on Swedish and Chinese comparison, especially in terms of word order hasn’t done so much yet. Therefore, on the basis of comparative analysis theory, we try to find the similarities and differences between Swedish and Chinese word order from two different perspectives. First, from perspective of macro and micro we compare the general principle on the structure combination and the sequence between neighbor words; secondly, also the focus of this thesis, from simple main clause level, considering each sentence component as a comparative unit and static and dynamic context separately as background, we try to discuss each sentence component’s relative placement as detailed as possible. The comparative standard and main components (S、V、0) involved are bidirectional for highlighting the differences between the two languages, so that the comparison results could be able to provide reference for both teaching Chinese and translation between Swedish and Chinese.First, we generally compare the word order between Chinese and Swedish.Chinese is an isolated language and also an analytic language from the perspective of linguistic typology. Swedish is an inflected language which is under the transition process from synthetic to analytic language. The parataxis of Chinese is greater than hypotaxis, which means Chinese is more flexible concerning word order rules comparing to the strict Swedish principle of verb-second position. From a macro perspective, the combination of sentence elements is more regular in Chinese, from the microscopic point of view, the two languages differs greatly in the order of language chunks.Secondly, we discuss the main components of Chinese and Swedish under static and dynamic two different contexts. The word order of main clauses under static context are sorted by tones, Our comparison study shows that the word order of four basic declarative sentence are the same between two languages; As for imperatives,both languages begin with verbs, therefore it leads to the subject-verb inversion in Swedish, Chinese still keeps the original word order; they both their unique expression of exclamatory; Relatively, the word order of questions become rather more complex that should be analyzed carefully depanding on the specific circumstances. In contrast to the dynamic displacement, respectively, we consider each language as the subject and the other as the reference at the same time. We came to conclusion that when displacement occurs in Chinese main components, there is always a relationship between two of the components involved which is not the same case in Swedish. Instead, the rule of displacement is either a component becomes the theme of the clause so that it will be forward to the beginning or components move to the right side of the clause when emphasis arises, in that case, the principle is that the verb follows to the second place.Futher more, the difference between the positions of their modifiers is that the attributes in Chinese regardless of word or phrase always precede the main modified word, however, In Swedish only some words could be placed front, Clauses, phrases, and some adverbs have to be post-placed. The similarities occur mainly among the multiple attributes.As for the adverbials, they each has their own standard of adverbial classification, Swedish classifies adverbials into CA which modifies the whole sentence, and other modifiers called OA. In the static context, CAs are placed after the verbs and OAs are put in the end. The placement of Chinese adverbials are more flexible, usually follow the subject in the second place. As a unique grammar phenomenon in Chinese, Complement is rather difficult and should be specifically analyzed. Finally, there are the subject predicative and object predicative in Swedish, they are placed differently depending on the corresponding components in Chinese.For instance, sentence with object predicative could be pivotal sentences or sentences with complements. In order to get further knowledge on how the comparative analysis influences both teaching and learning Chinese to Swedes, we did questionnaire survey twice. By comparing the difference of error occurrence, we came to the conclusion that comparative analysis helps the learners to get a general knowledge about the similarities and differences between Chinese and Swedish word order. But it is incapable to fix all the questions concerning Word order. Apart from doing exercise of word combination principle, more input in Chinese language, developing language sense and improve the comprehensive level of Chinese will be also significantly needed.Finally, To some extent, the results of the questionnaires also verified the theory of Grammar learning difficulty levels proposed by Eliis(1986), indicating that the difficulty curve in descending order is "intersection phenomenon" is greater than "Deficiency phenomenon","Deficiency phenomenon" is greater than "totally opposite phenomenon ","totally opposite phenomenon" is greater than "identical phenomenon" According to the analysis, we also classify the difficulty level by selecting and assessing the grammar items of our questionnaires, the difficulty curve in descending order turns out to be "Complement) form the subject> Chinese dynamic displacement of marked grammar items> manner/state/degree adverbial> dynamic displacement grammar items in Chinese unmarked> number of attribute> interrogative sentences) negative adverbs"...