A Contrastive Study Of Actual Division Between English And Chinese

The theory of actual division is also called Sentence Functional Perspective, it is established by one of the founders of the Prague School—Mathesius in the 1920s. He proposes the actual division based on communicative functional analysis, to distinguish from form division based on grammatical analysis. He divides a sentence into two parts: departure of statement and nucleus of statement. He believes that according to context, departure of statement is known information or at least easy to be known, it is considered as the introduction of the discourse. Nucleus of statement is relevant to departure of statement. They are two basic elements of actual division. He carries out actual division according to word order: objective order and subjective order. This theory investigates the sentence in the real communicative context and has opened up new areas of syntax research. This is also the greatest contribution of Mathesius to human linguistics.On the basis of his research, Firbas, Danes, Halliday and so on develop and cultivate Mathesius' theory. Firbas proposes "communicative dynamism"; Danes holds "thematic progression"; Halliday makes theme -rheme division perfect. He believes that theme and rheme constitute a message. Theme and rheme are not only relevant to message, but also relevant to word order. So theme is the departure of a sentence; it is always at the beginning of the sentence. Rheme is the core of a sentence, it comes after the theme and launches around the theme. There are two standards to define theme according to Halliday: one starts from function, the other is from the point of form. He divides theme into three kinds: simple theme, multiple theme and clause as theme.This paper distinguishes Mathesius' and Halliday's division simply and draws a conclusion that English and Chinese both have a relatively fixed word order. So in this article the author follows Halliday's theory. After introducing some definitions and theories relevant to actual division, the author distinguishes actual division applied in two languages and concludes that the two languages share some similarities and differences. The research of this thesis has some theoretical significance, as well as some practical significance.