Contrastive Study On Chinese And English Imperatives

The comparison between Chinese and English, covering a lot of aspects, has ever attracted the attention of a large number of researchers and great achievements have been made. However, the comparative study on imperatives hasn't, which is conducive not only to cultural exchange, but also to Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, in particular, the advanced oral Chinese teaching.With the achievements of contrastive linguistics and the researches on the imperatives in Chinese and English as theoretical basis, this paper first fully describes the imperatives from the perspective of syntax and semantics, then, explores and accounts for the root causes of the similarities and differences. The thesis mainly focuses on (1) the syntactic status and interpretation of imperative subjects, (2) semantic features of imperative predicates, (3) several kinds of English imperatives which are syntactically unique, (4) the force of imperatives.The thesis is divided into seven chapters.Chapter I provides an overview of researches into Chinese and English imperatives and presents the main purposes and methods of the paper.In chapter II, the imperatives are re-defined and classified according to their syntactic structure, which makes the narrative more convenient.Chapter III and IV are the main parts of this paper. The two chapters investigate the syntactic status of imperatives and semantic features of the predicates. Furthermore, the similarities and differences between Chinese and English imperatives are explored and the reasons are clarified. The theta theory and government-binding theory are used here to prove that, although imperative subject does not usually present in the surface structure, it exists in the deep structure and functions like the overt subject syntactically and semantically. Both covert subject and overt one are in essence the second person. There follow thorough analyses of the predicates of imperatives, particularly verbs and adjectives, and explanations of relevant phenomena.Chapter V inquires into five kinds of English imperatives which are not frequently used, including imperatives with let, conditional imperatives, imperatives with perfect and progressive verbs and passive imperatives.Chapter VI briefly sums up the means by which the force of an imperative can be enhanced or diminished.Chapter VII summarizes the results of this paper, pointing out the inadequacies and the room for the further research.