A Contrastive Study Of The Use Of Appreciative And Derogatory Words In English And Chinese Political Essays

PengXuanwei (2000) claims that Chinese has a tendency towards using more appreciative and derogatory words than English. By making both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of our data, this thesis aims at comparing the use of such attitudinal words in English and Chinese political essays. We are to determine whether there is such a difference between English and Chinese, and if there is, to explore how and why such a difference has come into being. Through our study, we find that Chinese and English are different in the use of appreciative and derogatory words in political essays in the following ways:(1) Chinese tends to use appreciative/derogatory words, while English tends to use neutral words.(2) Chinese tends to use evaluative words as premodifiers, while English exhibits no such tendency.(3) Functional words tend to be used in Chinese to intensify the appreciative or derogatory meaning, while such functional words are rarely used in English for the same purpose.We believe that the difference in the use of appreciative and derogatory words in English and Chinese political essays can be accounted for by the difference in the proportion of appreciative, derogatory and neutral words in the vocabulary, and by the difference...