A Contrastive Study Of The English And Chinese Comparative Construction

Comparison is one of the most important means to get to know and understand the world. The grammatical meaning of comparison comes into being when the relation of comparison between entities is reflected in language. Owing to different comparative relations between entities, different comparative meanings in language occur. When these meanings get together, a comparative category is shaped. Various comparative constructions manifest human recognition of the similarities and dissimilarities between entities.Since comparative construction is shared by all natural languages including English and Chinese, contrastive studies among the languages are necessary. Just as Chao Yuenren, a well known Chinese linguist, said: "What so-called linguistic theory, in fact, is making contrast between different languages, a scientific research finding by a synthetically contrastive analysis of languages of various nationalities in the world." (Cited from Wang Li, 1983: 40). By means of a thorough and careful contrast of two languages, we could have a profound comprehension of the characteristics and laws of these two languages (Xu Yulong, 2002: 12).Based on fundamental theories of contrastive linguistics, this thesis centers on a contrastive study of the English and Chinese comparative construction in an attempt to explore the similarities and particularly explore the dissimilarities between these two languages.Some Chinese scholars have conducted a contrastive study of the English and Chinese comparative construction, but they did not set standards of judging a comparative category. Consequently, they could not carry out a thorough and systematic contrastive study, that is to say, they lay stress on morphological changes of gradable words and on finding different formulae for comparison in English and Chinese. Moreover, theyhave not analyzed why the differences exist between the two languages. In order to make a thorough contrast of the English and Chinese comparative construction, the thesis first sets standards of judging the comparative category, that is, those with all semantic features of comparison, and forms that conform to semantic requirements for comparison belong to the comparative category, otherwise the scope of the comparative category would be enlarged. Then, the thesis offers a macroscopic and microscopic contrastive study of the English and Chinese comparative construction. The macroscopic contrastive study comprises the following five aspects: gradable words, relations of comparison, comparative dimension, special comparative items and ellipsis. In the microscopic study, a detailed contrast is presented concerning relations of comparison syntactically, semantically and pragmatically.After the contrast this thesis points out that there are many similarities between the English and Chinese comparative construction, which become foundations of the contrastive study, but their differences outweigh their similarities, for different philosophical bases, attributes of each language system and cultural backgrounds of English and Chinese lead to different habitual expression.It is hoped that through the contrastive study language learners can gain a better insight into peculiarities of the English and Chinese comparative construction;and what is more important, improve their competence and performance in language.