A Macro Contrast Between English And Chinese In The Perspective Of Thinking Styles

The study of this paper belongs to a growing field-the contrastive study of English and Chinese. The main idea of the paper originates from the books and articles by two pioneering scholars in the field, Professor Lian Shu'neng and Professor Pan Wen'guo.Starting from a contrastive study of respective thinking styles, this paper attempts a macro contrast between English and Chinese languages. For the convenience of in-depth analysis, it selects two chief aspects: the contrast between thinking in images and thinking in abstraction; and the contrast between the unity of subjectivity with objectivity and separation of subjectivity from objectivity. In the first aspect, the paper begins with discussion of primitive geographical environments in order to explain the environmental reasons for those dividing tendencies of thinking. After that, the paper comes to the philosophical area trying to illustrate these two kinds of thinking with philosophical categories and philosophical reasoning. In this part, the paper cites the examples of "五行"(Five Elements), "天"(Heaven), "地"(Earth), "阴"(Yin), "阳"(Yang) to illustrate Chinese tendency of thinking in images. On the other hand the paper displays Aristotle's ten categories and Kant's twelve categories to show westerner's inclination for abstraction. The embodiment of these different thinking styles is unfolded at levels of writing systems, lexicology, syntax,paragraphs and rhetoric. At the level of writing system, the paper argues that the two different ways of creating writing systems are the manifestation of the thinking in image and in abstraction. Chinese characters relate the meaning to the drawing-like characters while English alphabetical system connect meaning with the sound of the people's speech. This is a reflection of different thinking styles. In the lexicology part, morphemes of both languages are contrasted, which shows that Chinese has more image-related morphemes than English. The imagery and abstract thinking styles are also embodied in each people's preference to the usage of verbs or nouns in sentences. While Chinese people are fond of using verbs for imagery expressions, English people tend to nominalise its verbs, which makes the meaning inclined to be abstract. A survey of Chinese and English poems shows that images are more emphasized inChinese poems than in western ones. Modern texts such as essays and advertisements in English and Chinese also present the difference of image inclination and abstraction tendency. Another contrast of Chinese and English is in the perspective of different attitudes towards relationship' between subjectivity and objectivity or in other words the man-nature relationship. The paper still starts its discussion from the analysis of respective primitive environments. Since primitive Chinese people lived in an environment favorable for agriculture, they were likely to concludefrom their peaceful life that the relationship between man and the nature was harmonious hence the unity of man and the nature. European surroundings in the primitive times was not so advantageous for agriculture, and their life was closely connected with the adventure in the sea, therefore in their eyes relationship between man and nature was separate. And then the paper cites some examples from Chinese classic works such as I Ching and the Great Learning to demonstrate the thinking style, meanwhile it also investigates westerner's philosophical attitude towards the man-nature relationship. After the brief review of the thinking styles, the paper focuses its discussion on the embodiment of thinking styles in respective languages. At the level of syntax, it is found that English sentences have more impersonal subjects than Chinese ones, which is a reflection of English people's sharper consciousness of objectivity and Chinese people's habitual focus upon man. The different thinking styles are also embodied in the fact that Chinese people use more sentences with active voice and fewer sentences with passive voice than westerners do...