A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Relative Clauses

The study of relative clauses has been considered as one of the most important subjects in the field of linguistics, and many enlightening researches have been conducted as a result. Nevertheless, studies on the comparison between English and Chinese relative clauses are rare and mainly focus on the superficial description and introduction of language phenomena. These contrastive studies are not within a unified theoretical frameworkAs current contrastive researches on relative clauses in English and Chinese are too limited, this essay will conduct a detailed contrast and description of the two structures in both English and Chinese, in the areas of historical evolution, branching direction, relativizers, restrictiveness and relativization. With the help of cognitive linguistics, the essay tries to give a tentative explanation to these similarities and differences between. The main viewpoints of the paper are summarized as follows:1, Historical Evolution: Complex sentences in English and Chinese have undergone the same evolutionary process "parataxis＞hypotaxis＞subordination or embedding". The English relative clause, as one type of complex sentences, exhibits its features in grammaticalization of clause combining strategies, while the Chinese relative clause does not exhibit the same exact features, although other complex sentences do. The reason is mainly due to the fact that English is hypotaxis-prominent while Chinese is parataxis-prominent.2, Branching Direction: English and Chinese relative clauses show different branching directions. In English the relative clause follows immediately the head noun while in Chinese the relative clause mostly appears in front of the head. The paper holds that different cognitive models cause this phenomenon, as the English language embodies a "figure-to-ground" cognitive order while the Chinese language embodies a "ground-to-figure" cognitive order.3, Relativizers: Relativizers vary in number, semantic features between the two languages, but there is still some common ground. The paper points out that relativizers in both languages have undergone the process of grarnmaticalization.4, Restrictiveness: There are restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in both English and Chinese. The distinction includes pronunciation (contrastive stress), handwriting (comma) in English. And in Chinese the distinction is less obvious. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the paper tires to distinguish the two. It argues that when a relative clause is to identify one member of a category from a set, it is restrictive. Otherwise it is non-restrictive.5, Relativization: Not all nouns in simplex sentences can act as head nouns and be modified by relative clauses. Classifying the head nouns into seven categories, we mainly concentrate on the relativization order of subject, direct object, indirect object and object of comparison with the aid of AH (accessibility hierarchy). We find that the process of relativization processes in English and Chinese are quite similar. Besides, relativization in Chinese is closely associated with topicalization. In fact either the relativization or topicalization is a process of forming figures.By these comparison and contrast, we conclude that relative clauses in English and Chinese can, to a great extent, reflect the intimate relationship between language structures and cognition, and best represent the mental process. The conclusion we draw is that relative clauses, despite different features in English and Chinese, are products of human cognition, not suggested by formal linguists that varied surface structures derived from one deep structure by movement. By this contrastive study, we can get a clear and full understanding of relative clauses in English and Chinese. And the research will undoubtedly shed more light on language acquisition and translation for both English and Chinese learners.