A Contrastive Analysis Of Personal Suffixes In English And Chinese

English is a morphological language in which affixation process is one major means of creating new words, while Chinese, as an isolating language which is short of morphological changes, cannot form new words by means of affixation in the period of ancient period, but the number of Chinese suffixes is on the increase due to the influence of some foreign languages and its own evolution process-more and more suffixes are entering into the Chinese language through means of grammaticalization of content words, metaphor, metonymy and lexical borrowing. This thesis intends to give a contrastive analysis of the Chinese and English personal suffixes and the purpose is to find the similarities and differences between them. Based on the previous researches, the author sets up specific standards for personal suffixes and selects37Chinese personal suffixes and20English ones. The data, or derivatives of these personal suffixes are from www.google.com.hk, Modern Chinese Dictionary in Reverse Order (1987), Reverse English Dictionary and the corpus developed by Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU. Adopting the method of contrastive linguistics, the author focuses on the contrast of the syntactic category constraints on the bases and the semantic features between the Chinese and English personal suffixes. Major findings of this study are as follows:a) Chinese and English personal suffixes could both be added to noun, verb, and adjective bases. Their difference lies in that the Chinese ones could also be used after verb+object bases, ordinal numeral bases and cardinal numeral bases, while the English ones could be used after preposition bases and words that have more than one part of speech.b) Both Chinese and English personal suffixes fall into four general semantic fields, ie: OCCUPATION or ACTION, RELIGION or BELIEF, NATIONALITY or BACKGROUND, and PEJORATIVE SENSE. Their differences lie mainly in three aspects:first, there are suffixes exclusively used to indicate gender in English which have no equivalents in Chinese. In Chinese, gender is normally expressed thorough vocabulary means. Second, Chinese is rich in suffixes showing kinship terms which are becoming increasingly productive, while nearly no personal suffixes could be found in English to express kinship. Third, the quantity of English personal suffixes is relatively stable, while their Chinese counterparts are always on the increase.The contrastive analysis of Chinese and English vocabulary system will contribute to the discovery of commonness and differences in various layers of these two languages, which is of great significance to the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, translation between Chinese and English and the acquisition and learning of the English vocabulary.