| In the riptide of English and Chinese being animated in the vigorous mass campaign, more and more people realize that the most effective way of learning a foreign language well is to compare it with the native language and to get acquainted with the characteristics of the two languages. Although there is a long history of the contrastive analyses of different languages, contrastive studies was put forward as a formal term first by an American linguist, L. Treder. in 1949 in his view that the center of the general contrastive linguistics is to compare kin languages or non-kin languages synchronically. From then on numerous countries have greatly developed the synchronic contrastive studies of cross-language problems, many contrastive grammars appearing, and meanwhile multitudinous linguists have applied the research achievements in modern linguistics to the translation research so that a linguistics school of so-called translation theory has emerged. The basic research method is the comparative method; to master a language better, one had better understand another language: without a mirror, one cannot know his own appearance properly. This makes a point that linguistic comparison is considerably significant and is valued increasingly in the fields of learning, education.and research.English gerund and Chinese gerund are frequently used and scholars have done much research on them, which is largely limited to grammatical phenomena such as the features, logic Subjects, negations, transformations, and the differentiation from infinitives and present participles as for the former, and the qualities, the relationship to verbs, nouns, and nominalization as for the latter-those are paid much attention to. A comparative or profound study of English and Chinese gerund hasn't made its appearance up to now.Language is composed of semiotic units that can convey external linguistic information (like thoughts), so semiotics offers a door to the linguistic study: linguistic semiotics is the very linguistics that engenders at the intersection of linguistics and semiotics and studies the semiotic characteristics of language. As the most fundamental type of human communication sign, language possesses distinguishing semiotic features such as arbitrariness, two-sidedness and systematicness despite its distinctive features as it is a commonly used communication tool. Considering the present research on gerund and the value of semiotics to contrastive linguistics, this thesis explores the similarities and differences of English and Chinese gerund from the semiotic view and the application of the comparison to translation, as a preliminary of further relevant research.The present dissertation consists of six chapters, with the first one as the introduction.Chapter two elaborates English and Chinese gerund. In this chapter gerund is defined according to the form and grammatical function, that is, English and Chinese gerund have both verbal and nominal features, in form being a verb followed by the suffix -ing and a true verb respectively. This sets English gerund apart from English noun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, and present participle which have the same forming manner as gerund and thus are easy to confuse, and makes motivated the speaking way of Chinese gerund, avoiding the controversial views of the Chinese language field on "verb" at the Subject/Object position in the light of its differences from noun and verb. Gerund and gerundial phrase together are called gerundial nexus, and they are employed flexibly and variedly: such a case is also involved in this chapter.Chapter three inquires into aspects of sign. A sign is a combination of form and content, the linking of which is arbitrary generally despite the very few motivated signs; language is a sort of sign. A sign system is made up of elements and structure combining form and content, and different sign systems are similar in some respects and different in others.Built upon chapter two and chapter three, chapter four investigates the s...
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