Figure-Ground Analysis Of Different Word Orders In English And Chinese Complex Sentences

English and Chinese belong to different families of languages. Chinese is paratactic, following the word order of chronological sequence; the central meaning is connected together through semantic relations between words rather than restrained by grammatical rules. English, by contrast, depends on conjunctions to keep the sentence complete, so complex sentences, where subordinate conjunctions linking subordinate clause with the main clause, are abundant in English discourses. What's more, word order is one of the important concepts in language studies. This paper probes into the deep cause of different word orders in English and Chinese complex sentences, with the purpose of reinforcing people's comprehension of English and Chinese languages.This paper is intended to explore the word order in Chinese and English from the "figure-ground" theory, and a contrastive analysis will be made at the sentential level, mainly represented by the complex clause. In the process of the research, English-Chinese parallel corpus is employed. Different representations of English and Chinese complex sentences reflect the diverse actualizations of cognitive theories.According to figure-ground theory, when people are observing the spatial relation of two objects, one object is taken as the focus of attention, and the other object as reference or background. The focus of attention is usually called "figure", the reference is regarded as "ground". Talmy first applies "figure-ground theory" to language study. Figure-ground relationship can be used to analyze the prepositional meanings of locative relations, as well as the events belonging to the temporal or cause-effect relations.This paper combines figure-ground theory with the contrastive analysis of English and Chinese complex sentences. A conclusion is attained about the basic word order of Chinese and English in complex sentences, that is, in most cases Chinese follows the "ground-figure" model and English follows the "figure-ground" order; specifically speaking, an English complex sentence is initiated with main clause, then followed by the subordinate clause, and in Chinese fuju, circumstantial event comes first, then followed by the prominent part, that is the "figure" part. The studies carried out in this paper contribute to expanding the application of contrastive linguistics and cognitive theories.