A Contrastive Study Of Thinking Modes Reflected In English And Chinese Syntaxes

The relationship between language and thinking has been a hot argument among linguists and scholars. Among them, Spair-Whorf Hypothesis( Linguistic Determinism Theory) and J. Piaget's Thinking Determinism Theory are two representative ones. No matter whether thinking determines language or language determines thinking, linguists, scholars and philosophers admit that language and thinking are complementary and restrained to each other. The development of thinking accelerates the development of language and the development of language riches the contents of thinking.However, different thinking modes between Chinese and the Westerners are resulted from different social histories and geographic, environmental features, ideological tendencies, traditional economical and political systems.This thesis systematically analyzes the theories of the linguists and scholars about the relationship between language and thinking, summarizes the different thinking modes, and analyzes how these differences influence foreign language learning from the aspect of syntax.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is the brief introduction to the whole thesis. The author introduces the research background of this thesis, and the significance of this research; Chapter Two is related literature review and presents the previous and current achievement of research in this field and the definition of thinking and thinking modes are listed as well for better understanding; Chapter Three tells the relationship between thinking and language and clarifies the concepts of theories of Thinking Determinism and Linguistic Determinism and typical ideas of Chinese linguists.; Chapter Four tells the differences between Chinese thinking modes and Western thinking modes: among them, the dominant differences are: holistic thinking vs. analytic thinking; ethical thinking vs. cognitive thinking; figurative thinking vs. abstract thinking; gyre thinking vs. linear thinking and subject conscious thinking vs. object conscious thinking. According to these different thinking modes, Chapter Five makes comparison with different thinking modes embodied in English and Chinese syntaxes,after comparison, the representative differences between Chinese and English are: Chinese is regarded as non-inflectional language, parataxis, simple and personal language; While, English is regarded as inflectional language, hypotaxis, complex and impersonal language. On the basis of the difference, in Chapter Six, the thesis explains the reasons why Chinese students of English make such Chinglish mistakes while writing in terms of the comparison of the different syntactic structure characteristics between Chinese and English and on the other hand, lists the typical mistakes made by Chinese learners of English and neglect of teachers'teaching in writing. The implications of this contrastive study for teaching and learning English have been also contained in this chapter. In Conclusion at the end of the thesis, the author expresses the intention of this research: try to solve this problem and give suggestions to the Chinese students and teachers of English on how to use idiomatic English and write effectively. Meanwhile, the author sums up the limitation of this thesis and makes future prospect.