A Comparative Study Of Case In Chinese And English

Case is a very important category in the linguistics and its classifications, forms and functions have been the focus of the traditional and modern linguistics. The Case studied in this dissertation is the syntactic Case(Chomsky 1980.1986,1995,2005a, etc.) of the generative grammar, which is not changed according to the inflection and exists universally in all the languages. There are similarities and differences between the Case and the case in the "gender, number and case" in the traditional grammar. Case refers to the grammatical properties or the morphological characteristics for a nominal element in a certain position of a sentence, which denotes certain syntactic and semantic relationships. The Case is the inherent basic property of all the arguments, the licensing condition for the appearance of the argument, the filter for construction of the sentence and the motivation of the movement.Only in the complete and systematic comparison and contrast, can we know the characteristics and the nature of the language deeply. With the Principles and Parameters Theory as the theoretical basis, the similarities and differences between the Chinese Case category and English one were fully described and explained in the dissertation. Through the concept of Case, we linked the concerned linguistic phenomena to check, develop and perfect the Case theory and forecast the development tendencies of the Case. The related theories were applied to explain the linguistic phenomena and the practice can develop the theory.Through the analysis from the linguistic theory to the linguistic phenomena, from the synchronic to the diachronic, from the regular to the exceptional, from the descriptive to the explanative, we found a series of similarities and differences between the Chinese and English Case category. The main similarities are as follows:Firstly, diachronically, Chinese and English ever had case forms and came to be replaced by the preposition and word order. Its reflection in the ancient Chinese is the different distributions of the pronouns and there is still some declension fossil in some dialects, such as Xunhua dialect in Qinghai Province and Yanshan dialect in Jiangxi Province. As for the ancient English, there were rich declensions in the N, Prep and Pron, with different inflections for different cases.Secondly, synchronically, there exist nominative, accusative, oblique and genitive Case in Chinese and English. A lot of asymmetries in the structural and inherent Cases can be explained by the empty category and the Case-assigning host, etc.Thirdly, there exist the exceptional argument structures, including the argument augmentation, argument deletion and argument sharing. The Case-assigning host can explain the unconventional Case-assigning phenomena and the relative syntactic problems.Fourthly, the development tendency of the Case is from complexity to simplicity, and the case form came to drop off in both Chinese and English.Of course, Chinese and English belong to different language typologies. As far as the Case is concerned, besides the similarities, there exist some differences between them:Firstly, the different degrees of declension. The ancient Chinese reflects in the different distributions of the personal pronoun and the ancient English reflected in every noun, pronoun and adjective, which is much richer than that in Chinese.Secondly, the different syntactic representations of the Case. There is null subject, double subject even multiple subject in Chinese, while English not; there is expletive in English, while Chinese not. The classification of Vt and Vi is very strict in English, which is not so strict in Chinese. The difference of inherent Case between them is not so much and mainly exist in the forms while their functions are similar.Thirdly, the frequency of using the exceptional argument is different. As for the argument augmentation and argument sharing, Chinese is more frequent than English. Argument deletion is common in Chinese while it is rare in English.The universality in the Chinese and English Case category is determined by the structure of the human brain and the language faculty, reflecting the principle of the universal grammar. The difference of human languages mainly lies in the functional categories, which are the different values of the parameter in the universal grammar. From the perspective of typology, Chinese is the isolating language, parataxis language, analytic language, and diffusive language, and the form is organized by the meaning; while English is the inflectional language, hypotaxis language, synthetic language, and compact language, and the meaning depends on the overt form. A Comparative Study of Case in Chinese and English is of great significance in the typology.