A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Adverbial Clauses Of Reason

This paper intends to make a contrastive study on adverbial clauses of reason in English and Chinese. Adverbial clause is classified in narrow or broad senses. For example, Quirk et al provides a broad categorization by taking the finite clause, nonfinite clause, and verbless clause into consideration. Similarly, in Chinese, celebrated linguists like Lu Shuxiang, Li Jinxi and Wang Li have made scientific analyses on this topic. Among them, Lu Shuxiang's classification is the most comprehensive and systematic. Later, more scholars who have dedicated themselves to the contrastive study of English and Chinese have made some researches and analyses in this field. It seems that the majority of them agree that Chinese is a kind of paratactic language, so, the semantic relations are more important than grammatical devices. Therefore they agree that most of the Chinese sentences are combined without the conjunctions.However, by a contrastive analysis based on the 150 clauses of reason selected from The Scholars, this finds that almost 120 sentences of them are marked by conjunctions, and the percentage is 83.7%. Apart from that, this also discussed the order of the conjunctions of reason. By a careful analysis on the figures provided by LOB Corpus and London-Lund Corpus, and the 150 examples mentioned above, it is found that in English, 92% of the conjunctions are usually put at a final position, which is the focus of new information, and it provides an explanation to the main clause. In Chinese, almost 93% of the selected sentences are following the order of "reason and result", and reason is the focus of information. Therefore, no matter where reason is located in a sentence, it is always the information focus both in English and in Chinese.This paper is divided into five parts: the first part offers a survey on the study of English and Chinese adverbial clauses of reason respectively, and makes some comments on the classifications, thus showing the purpose of this paper; the second part presents the contrastive study from the angle of conjunctions of reason in English and Chinese, which is based on the contrastive analysis of the selected materials. It is discovered after the research that in Chinese there are also many conjunctions of reason and a high frequency of distribution in texts or discourses. The third part makes a study on the positions of the conjunctions. The fourth part tries to classify theways to express reason in English and Chinese in order to show that there are various ways to express the reason, and this might be a possible approach to explain the previous analysis and it also discusses the practical value of the contrastive study in English and Chinese. The fifth part is the conclusion to restate the thesis.