A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Clause Complexes

A survey of the literature in the contrastive study of English and Chinese reveals that far less effort has been made in comparing the syntactic structures of these two languages than in contrasting their phonetic, lexical and semantic aspects. Studies have been conducted mostly below or at the clause level. Even if some research has been done above the clause level, attention has almost exclusively been paid to the relatively simple sentence and rather complex sentences have nearly been neglected. In order to explore the nature and features of Chinese and English clause complexes and then help develop a deeper insight into the nature and features of the two languages, this paper, taking the Chinese paratactic clause complex as its major concern, makes a systematic contrast at both vertical and horizontal levels between Chinese and English clause complexes.This paper first brings forth the grammatical hierarchies of English and Chinese to clarify the grammatical status of the clause complex in these two languages respectively. Then our study is devoted to the basic patterns and features of the English and Chinese clause with a view to making a vertical comparison to show the difference between the clause and the clause complex. Our exploration reveals that the syntactic structure of English clause complexes is in essence the same as that of English clauses while the Chinese clause complex is basically different from the Chinese clause but similar to a sentence group in many cases.Then a horizontal comparison is made between the English and Chinese clause complexes and it shows that the English complex sentence expands outward from the main clause, that the semantic-logic relations among the clauses and word groups within a complex are mainly expressed by inflected forms, connectives and prepositions, and that it is closed and compact in structure and rigid in logic. By contrast, the Chinese paratactic clause complex, accounting for about half of the...