A Contrastive Study Of Sentence Structures Between Chinese And English: "TC" Vs "SVO"

Contrastive linguistics studies two or more languages synchronically and diachronically, with the aim of discovering their differences and similarities and then applying these findings to related areas of study. Contrastive study is often carried out at three levels: syntactic structure, ways of expression and linguistic psychology, among which the contrastive study of syntactic structures between two or three languages plays a significant role.Nowadays, systematically and theoretically, great achievements have been made in the study of English sentence structure, and grammatical framework has been established. But because the theory and system of Chinese sentence structure are basically modeled on those of Indo-European languages, how to analyze Chinese sentence structure becomes a heated discussion.With the method of Contrastive Analysis, focus of the research is put on the study of sentence structure between Chinese and English. Through the analysis of Selected Modern Chinese Essays and An Anthology of Chinese Short-Short Stories in Chinese and English by Professor Zhang Peiji, The Most Beautiful Prose by Xu Hanlin and Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, this thesis mainly studies the differences of sentence structures between Chinese and English. Research indicates that, affected by Yin and Yang, Chinese sentences include two parts:"Topic"and"Comment", while governed by formal logic, English sentences mainly include three parts:"Subject","Verb"and"Object".Based on the former researches, this thesis generalizes some essential features of both Chinese and English sentence structures respectively. Practically, the results of these findings will benefit us a lot in C-E translation and some strategies of translation have been found out. It shows that most"Topics"of Chinese are translated into subjects or adverbials of English, and"Comments"are translated into predicates of English with widely-used VO structure.Theoretically and practically, it should be pointed out that this study is an explorative one. During the practice of translation from Chinese to English, the author deeply feels that translation is rather a complicated work and those strategies cannot cover all aspects, and there are still many remaining problems for further study.