A Contrastive Study Of Thematic Structure Between English And Chinese

Contrastive study is often made between any two languages in language learning and teaching. By this means, it will benefit us a lot in learning and teaching two different languages and help us to overcome difficulties in learning another language. At the same time, when analyzing a clause, we would not often like to study it from the structural point of view, instead, under most conditions from its elements. In spite of that, in this paper, focus will just put on a contrastive study of the thematic structure between Chinese and. English, that is from the structural point of view. The theoretical foundation is the thematic structure in Functional Grammar and the method employed is the contrastive analysis. By such a research, the author hopes to get some ideas of the Chinese and English Thematic structure, especially their wide differences, and also apply it to the English-Chinese translation. The whole paper falls into five chapters: the author begins the first chapter Introduction with general purpose and the overview of the dissertation, followed by a detailed account of theories on which the paper will base itself on in the second chapter. After that, the author presents themes in different Chinese and English clauses in the third chapter. Then comes the main part of the paper in the fourth chapter. The author carries out a contrastive study of thematic theme between English and Chinese from five aspects. Finally, the author ends the paper by summarizing the main points as well as assessing its significance and the limit of the research.