A Contrastive Study On Ambiguty In Chinese And English

Chinese and English,according to the language family they are in,are not akin to each other. Consequently the language structures are quite different. However, due to the prosperity of contrastive linguistics and the necessity of language teaching and translation, it is possible to explore into the similarity and difference of these two languages,which will help to improve Chinese teaching as a foreign language. Such a study helps us better see the similarity and difference between these two languages. On this basis we may further improve our foreign language and translation. This dissertation departs at a pure language level. This thesis classifies three kinds of ambiguity: lexical ambiguity and grammatical ambiguity and semantical ambiguity. The latter can be classification is similar to that of ambiguity in English, and it is easier for us to make a contrastive study between them. Through the study, we find that lexical ambiguity exists in large numbers in both languages. But it is not easy to find the completely equivalent lexical ambiguity in the two languages. As for grammatical ambiguity, we focus on the subordinate structures and coordinate structures. In these two kinds of structures, we mainly discuss the ambiguity caused by different syntactic relationships or by the multi-function of grammatical elements, or by both. Semantically structural ambiguity is the most complicated, this section compares some common ambiguity formats. And semantic relations ambiguity differs in Chinese and English, especially complex in Chinese.The active mood and passive mood differs greatly. In Chinese, lexic means plays an important role, as well as the the subject varity. But in English, the semantic ambiguity mainly is causesd by the possessive case and the non-finite forms. Ambiguity from the negative scope is much more in English than Chinese.