A Comparative And Contrastive Study On Logical-semantic Relations Between English And Chinese Clauses In Texts

Logic is an important foundation to organize and understand a text,and it exists in all kinds of texts.In texts,in terms of coherence,there can be no grammatical or lexical cohesion,but there must be logical cohesion,otherwise there will be no complete texts.The creation of a text is always on the basis of logical-semantic relations and emerges by logical structures.Therefore,the understanding of a text is the understanding of the logical-semantic relations by logical structures.Halliday states that clause complex is one of the basic semantic units of a text,and he classifies the logical-semantic relationships between clauses in clause complex into expansion and projection these two basic types.This study is based on the functional grammar and Halliday?s theory of logical-semantic relationships between clauses in clause complex.Altogether fourteen English and Chinese texts including formal and informal texts are selected as research data in this thesis and both qualitative and quantitative methods are used to make a comparative and contrastive study of the logical-semantic relations between English and Chinese clauses in texts from the aspect of the three subtypes of expansion,namely elaboration,extension and enhancement.Through detailed analysis,the results show that there are many similarities in logical-semantic relations between English and Chinese clauses in texts.First,both in English and Chinese texts the extension relationship takes the major part,then the enhancement,and the elaboration is the least in percentage.Second,the logical connection components may be implicit in both English and Chinese texts.At the same time,there are also many differences between them.Among the three kinds of expansion between clauses in English and Chinese texts,the proportion of elaboration in English texts is larger than in Chinese texts,the proportion of English extension is smaller than Chinese extension,and the proportion of English enhancement is smaller than Chinese enhancement.Besides,the English logical-semantic relations are more likely to use explicit conjunctive expressions than the Chinese.In a word,different cultural background,thinking patterns and expression forms and so on are the causes for the logical-semantic differences between English and Chinese clauses in texts.Therefore,this study not only has great practical significance for Chinese people to understand the logic of language expressions and thinking patterns of people who speak English in an international environment,for understanding the cultural differences between different countries,and for improving communication skills and reducing misunderstandings,but also is instructive for English text teaching and converting logical-semantic relationships in translation practice.