A Comparative Study Of Thought Patterns In English And Chinese Writing

As we know, language plays a very important role in intercultural communication. Inorder to learn a foreign language well, one not only has to learn the language itself, but alsohas to learn the information behind the language. Different language has different languageexpressive forms and those expressive forms were determined by the various thought patterns.Therefore this thesis will mainly discuss the relationship between language and thoughtpatterns from cultural perspective. Professor Ji Xianlin said,"The difference of Chinese andWestern culture lies in their different thought patterns, which have different foundation."There are many factors affect thought patterns such as culture, knowledge, custom, languageand so forth. The author mainly talks about the relationship between language and thoughtpatterns in this research. The author will introduce the concept of culture, language, thoughtpatterns and writing. The relationship among these elements will also be mentioned in thisthesis.After this, the thesis mainly compares Chinese and Western thought patterns and discussestheir influence on writing. In the research part, text analysis will be applied to this research.The author collected30essay samples written by famous Chinese and English writers. Thereare three parts in data analysis, including syntactic analysis, discourse analysis and theimplications for the teaching of English writing. At syntactic level, it mainly mentioned theinfluence of synthetic and analytic thought patterns on the use of prepositions, conjunctionsand relative words. It also introduced the impact of imaginative and abstractive thoughtpatterns on the figures of speech and the sentence structure. At discourse level, it generallyanalyzed the influence of thought patterns on the placement of topic sentence and thestructure of paragraph and discourse. At last, the author will give some suggestions on theteaching of English writing. Because of the limitation of time and energy, there must be errorsand shortages in this thesis; the author really hopes that further researches will be done in thisarea. At the same time, the author also hopes this research will give some benefits for theteaching of English writing in China.