A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Discourse Structures

Discourse expression analysis is an important concept in the current language study.Different with the textual linguistics research paradigm at home and abroad,the standpoint of this paper is the analysis of function of discourse structure based on the semantic syntactic category(Li Baojia,2009).This paper uses the latest achievements of Chinese topic-comment structure syntax(Qiu Xuemei 2011,2013)to make comparative analysis of English and Chinese discourse structure.In this paper,the theoretical basis is discourse structure function analysis and Initial-NP Determinism.As a functional analysis,the discourse structure can be divided into two types:Subject-predicate structure and topic-comment structure.A contrastive discourse analysis of the above structure types in English and Chinese will be a further development of Chinese topic-comment structure syntactic study.As the basic theory in discourse structure analysis,Initial-NP Determinism can be transformed into another formula:S=NP(r)+P?MS,which is a generalization of the basic rules that Subject-predicate structure and topic-comment structure play in discourse expression:The leading role of the initial-NP has to be achieved through a reference tag "r" which defines the start of the expressive function of a sentence.Based upon the tagging and analysis of English-Chinese corpus,the study established an English-Chinese discourse structure information corpus annotation based on the Chinese-English corpus excerpts from "a dream of red mansions".The total corpus is 300,000 words after tagging.Utilizing this tagged corpus,this article tries to make a comparative analysis of Chinese and English.The conclusions can be stated as follow:Firstly,through the corpus analysis,the paper argues that on the volume level,both subject-predicate structure and topic-comment structure in Chinese and English have relatively symmetrical distribution characteristics(categories like CunYou?XingZhuang?Dishi?LunDuan?PingGu got a relatively higher percent);In English,topic-comment sentences(2735)have more advantages than the subject-predicate sentences(2378).The topic-comment sentence's distribution in Chinese is much more balanced,while in English the distribution is relatively concentrated.Under the paradigm of discourse structure syntax study,English is topic-prominent as well as Chinese on the topic-comment structure syntactic level,only the distribution type in English is not balanced as it's in Chinese.Secondly,through typological examination and transformation analysis,the paper roughly summarized two kinds of differences in above two languages according to the mark,displacement and construct pattern of their discourse structure.Topic-comment structure with marks in English and Chinese includes Pinggu-category and Shuliang-category.The form tag of subject-predicate structure in English is only reference.From the point of discourse structure syntactic,displaced topic is not exist on the semantic structure level;but on expressional level,displaced topic is allowed in specific discourses.The main construct pattern in English and Chinese discourse structure are interactive pattern and subordinate pattern,these two patterns have different forms in topic-comment structure and subject-predicate structure.Topic-comment structure can convert each other,subject-predicate,too.Shuliang-category,however,is an exception,which only can be converted into one of its own type,or restricted in conversion.