A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Reflexives

It is well known that there are reflexives not only in English but in Chinese. Compared with English reflexives, Chinese reflexives, especially the simple reflexives"ziji"have their own distinctive features with regard to binding possibilities and referential properties. Considering it, there is still difference between English and Chinese reflexives, although the two are called as reflexives. Hence, This paper aims to contract English and Chinese reflexives and to find out the generality and difference.This paper consists of five chapters. The main body of this paper is from chapter 2 to chapter 5. Chapter 2 puts forward a distinctive standard of reflexives to make a clear definition of reflexives and define English and Chinese reflexives according to the characteristics of English and Chinese. Chapter 3 conducts a contractive study of the syntactic structure of English and Chinese reflexives according to Binding Theory and strive to offer a detailed description of reflexive forms in English and Chinese in order to discuss the validity of Binding Principle A in English and Chinese. In this chapter, there is an analysis of case features of English and Chinese reflexives as well. At the end of this chapter, it points out the differences and similarities existing in English and Chinese reflexives and explains why there are differences. Chapter 4 conducts a comparative study of grammatical function of English and Chinese reflexives and gives an explanation of the origin of differences according to the content of Chapter 3. Chapter 5 applies the definition of semantics to analyze English and Chinese reflexives' semantic connotation and semantic referent.At the end of the paper, it reaches a conclusion that there exist not only similarities but differences between English and Chinese reflexives. It isn't due the origin of differences to the discrepancy of two languages simply. And it is proved that Chinese reflexives cannot be taken as pronoun in the light of the differences. Binding theory is valid.