A Study On The Differences Between Chinese And English Figurative Word Building

It is common to see the figurative word building (FWB in short) in both Chinese and English language. And thus it's also common to find similarities as well as differences lying between the two. However, the former studies on the matter have been focused mainly on the Chinese figurative word building rather than on the differences, which is what this article is based on. The whole article is consisted of three parts as follows: the morphological differences, the syntax differences and the pragmatics differences.The first part could be detailed as the classification of the FWB, the structural differences and the differences between FWB and the metaphorical meaning in polysemous words.The second part includes the comparison of both the vocabulary and the structure of FWB.The pragmatics differences of FWB could be divided into another two parts, which are the differences in rhetoric and in culture respectively.The article is also written to shed light on teaching Chinese as a second language.