A Three-Dimensional Contrastive Study Of The Grammatical "Adverbials" In Chinese And English

Starting with an analysis of adverbials in Chinese and English, we find it has various categories and types. There are less papers to compare with its similarities and differences in two languages. So, within the framework of "Three-dimensional" Grammatical Theory, we adopt the methods of Formal School and Functional School as the tool to observe the characteristic of adverbials and seek out the laws which lead to its deep mechanism of coming to being.In the syntactic level, we mainly inspect the markedness and the position order of adverbials, discovering that the markedness in two languages is very different from each other related to the language type. Because Chinese is an Analysis-based language, the function word "de" exploits its advantages to manifest the adverbials. English is an Integrated-based language and has sufficient affixations such as "-ly" to be accordance with the request of adverbials. In order to solve the problem of adverbials' position order, we divide it into two parts: the single adverbials and multinomial adverbials, concluding that the similarity of adverbials between Chinese and English lies in the characteristic of "harmony" which is one of the terms in linguistic typology, meanwhile, its diversity attributes to the typology of two languages. Chinese is not a typical SVO and has more common grounds with SOV, but English belongs to SVO which are recognized so close as VSO. From the cognitive view, the different thinking mode also has decided the order of adverbials. We propose that the order of multinomial adverbials in Chinese and English possesses the homology and the heterism. The homology embodies the significance of typology of semantics-closing principle and identifiability-heading principle. When Chinese and English bearing the thought extend linearily, they have different patterns which account for the heterism of multinomial adverbials.As for the adverbials, it can be discriminated from the perspectives of the semantics, thus can be labeled as the general adverbials which contacts with verb merely and the so called "discourse adverbials" which touches upon the other elements out of the sentence involving in the discourse. These two parts are used to investigate their semantic directions respectively. As can be seen, the general adverbials in Chinese and English often predicates the verb and may aim at other components in the sentence simultaneously, for example subject, object and so on. The common cognitive structure has laid the similar foundation. As to the "discourse adverbials", we put it in Chapter 3 to discuss.In the pragmatic level, we mainly analyse the discourse functions of adverbials. According to the category of English adverbials in the discourse, the Chinese has the suitable adverbials as well. Through a systematic survey, we discover that the "discourse adverbials" in two languages takes on analogical function to organize the text and explain this phenomenon.Finally, we take the adverbials as the breakthrough, concern the unconventional order of the adverbials in Chinese and English separatedly to address that the Chinese and the English affect each other rationally.