A Contrastive Study Of Material Processes In English And Chinese

This thesis is a study of material processes in English and Chinese. It is assumed that in terms of material processes the two languages show their own features and meanwhile share some common characteristics. As entities closely related to processes, verbs attach themselves tightly to the types of material processes, which have their own thematic and figure-grounding distributions in English and Chinese, and in which the passive and ergativity also find their own traces of parallels and distinctions in the two languages. Based on the relevant theories of systemic functional grammar and cognitive linguistics, this paper analyzes how English material processes differ from their Chinese counterparts in various respects.As a process consists of, in principle, three components: the process itself, participant and circumstances, the material processes usually attach themselves to participants, e.g. the actor and / or the goal. And very often there are some other semantic roles, e.g. the range, the beneficiary and circumstantial elements. And due to differences of syntactic structures, the thematic structure and figure and ground of Chinese material processes show quite striking features that are distinct from those of their English counterparts. As...