A Contrastive Study On Polarity Category Between Chinese And English

Polarity category is verbalized differently in different languages. This paperattempts to compare and contrast the functional features of the overall Chinese andEnglish expression forms of polarity category systematically from the perspective ofsemantics, syntax and pragmatics. The major findings are:Firstly, the expressing forms of polarity category in Chinese and English can beconcluded into two categories—lexical methods and grammatical methods. From theperspective of meaning, polarity meaning can be classified into the absolute one andthe relative one, the subjective one and the objective one.Secondly, among all the expressing forms, adverbs especially zui(最) is one ofthe main expressing forms in Chinese while in English the superlative-forms are moredominating.Thirdly, Chinese polarity adverbs are much more complicated than the Englishones in functional features. Semantically, polarity adverbs in Chinese can expressabsolute sense and relative sense respectively. The English polarity adverbs can onlyexpress absolute sense. Syntactically, Chinese polarity adverbs are relatively fixed inposition compared with the English ones and there are much more restrictions on theselection of the modified elements. Pragmatically, if there is no sufficient context,some Chinese polarity adverb-bearing sentences will be ambiguous. However, this willnot happen to the English adverbs. Instead, English phrases at least and at most maycause pragmatic ambiguities due to the insufficient context.Last but not least, there are similarities in the constructions of Chinese andEnglish in expressing polarity category. Both of the languages achieve polaritymeaning through the affirmative ways and the negative ways. As to the phrases, bothlanguages get the polarity meaning from the semantic meaning, the logical analysis orthe relative cultural background.This study is of both theoretical and practical significance. In theory, thiscontrastive study has shed new light on the respective features of Chinese and English polarity category, contributed to the research on the universalities and specialitiesamong languages. In practice, the ultimate results of this analysis may providesignificant reference for the translation between Chinese and English, the teaching andlearning of Chinese and English related to polarity category.