An English-chinese Contrastive Analysis Of Coordinate Constructions: A Whorfian Approach

Since cross-cultural communication is prevalent in recent years, the researchconcerning about the relationship between language and culture has drawn attentionfrom more and more scholars, especially the contrastive linguists. Contrastive studieson different languages begin to emphasize more about the context and culture insteadof the superficial linguistic phenomena. In our thesis, we adopt the macro way toanalyze the similarities and differences between English and Chinese coordinateconstructions (henceforth CC) and try to reveal the different thinking styles of Englishand Chinese people.Based on Benjamin Lee Whorf’s contrastive theories in his studies of exoticlanguages especially American Indian languages and his idea of linguistic relativity,this thesis conducts a contrastive analysis on English and Chinese CC. Data of thisthesis are CC collected from the Chinese novella Shifu, You’ll do everything for alaugh by Mo Yan and its English translation by Howard Goldblatt. We compareEnglish and Chinese CC on two levels: syntactic and semantic level. The similaritiesand differences are figured out on both levels. The basic syntactic function andstructures and semantic relations of CC in English and Chinese are roughly the same.However, there are some trivial but important discrepancies between them. Insyntactic analysis, we find that the most essential difference between English andChinese CC is that the latter is often covert, while the former is usually overt by usingconjunctions or special punctuation marks to link the elements in CC. This shows thatChinese is paratactic whereas English is hypotactic. In semantic analysis, it is foundthat the ways to demonstrate the semantic relations of CC are much more varied inChinese than in English, which shows the flexibility of Chinese and rigidity ofEnglish. The studies on both levels reflect the features of each language and moreimportantly reveal the thinking styles or cultures of English and Chinese people thatdeeply rooted in these linguistic phenomena. The hidden, loose and elastic Chinese grammar and its pursuit for linguistic beauty reflect that traditional Chinese peoplestress perceptional comprehension and the harmony between man and nature. TheChinese flowing way of thinking is often controlled by the context or somesubmerged background information. Meanwhile, the explicit, strict and rigid Englishgrammar proves that English people prefer logical and analytical thinking andexpression in form.The significance of this study lies in the following three aspects: firstly, it helpsus understand the features of CC in English and Chinese more thoroughly which is ofgreat importance for language teaching; secondly, the findings of this study may serveas a guideline for translation practice; thirdly, I sincerely hope that this research canattract more scholars to join in our discussion of language and culture and hence makedue contribution to the cross-cultural communication.