Comparative Study On English And Chinese Word Order Universals In The Light Of Implicational Universals

Current research on languages has changed from the focus on the language differences to the study of language universals, which has become the trend in linguistics. There can't be singularity without the universals, and difference can only be found on the basis of the study of universals. And the study of language universals can be conducted from the different levels and perspectives. Greenberg, in 1966, proposed the conception of Implicational Universals and studied the language universals from the perspective of word orders, and classified basic word orders such as: SVO,SOV,VOS and so on, which symbolized the beginning of the word order typology. Following his research, the study on word order implicational universals has changed from the simple, deductive generations to the seeking of higher-level generations, i.e. deep principles that underlies the universals, from either internal language system or consideration outside of the language system. So Hawkins put forward a functional-typological approach from the external motivations to account for the universals. My study will use the Principle of Early Immediate Constituents, which seeks the explanations from the processing basis, combined with the generative and psycholinguistic ways, to make a comparative analysis on the English and Chinese word order.As for the struggling situation of Chinese university students in English writing, data for the study is collected from about 300 students in Guizhou Normal University via a questionnaire about the difficulties occurred in their English writing and 30students'performance of two tests including sentence combination tests and grammaticality judgment tests. Data collection is carried out among first-year learners of different majors and colleges at different English proficiency levels. After the classification the errors, the author uses the above findings to analyze the errors made by the students, and tries to give an explanation about the production of relative clauses from the processing strategy and also introduces the strategies that the students uses in making their judgments, which also gives the support of the Hawkins'prediction that the low ratio is resorted to when faced with the processing complexity, in the hope that it may provide some implications about teaching English writing in China.