A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Cohesion In English And Chinese-Hypotaxis And Parataxis

Chinese and English are two very different languages; the former belongs to the Sino-Tibetan Language Family, and the latter the Indo-European Language Family. In terms of textual organization, they show substantial differences. Chinese is mainly a pragmatic, paratactic and topic-prominent language, while English a grammatical, hypotactic and subject-prominent language. However,"for Chinese and English,"as Eugene Nida (1982:16) points out,"perhaps one of the most important linguistic distinctions is the contrast between the hypotaxis and parataxis."This thesis gives a contrastive study of grammatical cohesion in English and Chinese to reveal the most distinguishable difference between English and Chinese: English is a language of hypotaxis while Chinese that of parataxis. The former lays emphasis on formal cohesion, while the latter on semantic coherence.Each language has its way of building up a cohesive text. Chinese shares similar cohesive devices with English, but there are many differences in distribution and frequency. This is because English has the convenience of inflections and structure for formal cohesion, while, in the same case, Chinese often turns to lexical means to achieve the same cohesion.Language is an external manifestation of a nation's culture in the deep sense. The differences between languages are influenced by the underlying intrinsic mechanism. Therefore, a cultural analysis is made to explain that the hypotaxis of English and the parataxis of Chinese are the natural outcome of the disparities in their philosophies and modes of thinking. Western analytic philosophy and thinking on logic require explicit markers to show grammatical relations, while Chinese synthetic philosophy and thinking on imagery draw on the lexical means and word order to denote logical relations.English and Chinese belong to different language families. The cohesive differences between them are numerous. It is impossible to deal with them exhaustively in the limited space of a thesis. It is only hoped that through the tentative effort made in this thesis, students can have an awareness and understanding of the difference between Chinese and English, and have one more access to the practice of translation, English learning and cross-cultural communication.