A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Object Movement

Movement is a universal phenomenon in human languages. This is no exception in English and Chinese. There exist object position movements both in English and Chinese, namely passive construction, middle construction, topic construction and WH-construction. In English and Chinese, object position movement is based on the same cognition of emphasizing focus and information. Therefore, the two languages show many similarities in the structure of object movements, especially the moving process. This paper aims to compare and analyze this phenomenon and explain the grammaticalization of its formation on the basis of the general theories of constrastive linguistics, structuralism theory and Chomsky's T-G grammar and universal grammar. During the process of comparison, this paper tries to discover the similarities between English and Chinese in object movement in order to seek evidence for the UG. Though movement is a universal phenomenon, there are still some objects which can not move. This paper also summarizes and explains some general principles which determine the operations of movement.The body of this paper falls into two parts:The first part concerns those phenomena of object movements, mainly including NP movement (passive construction, middle construction, topic construction) and WH-movement(that is the interrogative serving as an object). It dynamically describes and analyzes the process of object movement as well as the structure after object movement.The second part concerns those objects which cannot move as well as object movement constraints, including the constraints affecting both the two languages, and Chinese and English respectively.