A Contrastive Study Of Chinese-English Sentence Structures Under The Three Differences In Thinking

Whorf – Sapir Hypothesis started the research of the relation between thinking and language. The latter researches show that the relation between them is interdependent and inter-presuppositional, thinking is determinative to language, and language influences thinking. The differences in thinking of different nationalities lead to the differences in their languages, especially in the sentence structure, sentential element distribution and sentence meaning interpretation.Because of the differences in natural environments and cultural settings, there exist huge differences in Chinese thinking and English thinking. Chinese thinking bears synthetic feature and English thinking embodies analytic feature, beneath which inductive, multi-cognition and deductive, single-cognition are by-produced in Chinese thinking and English thinking respectively. These differences cause the differences in sentence structures, sentential elements and sentence meaning recognitions and interpretations in Chinese and English.In sentence structure, Chinese language belongs to inductive type and English deductive type, they have different sentence orders. The inductive thinking of Chinese is demonstrated the form of Chinese sentential elements from the set of elements to a core element, forming an “inductive type” and English from a core to the set of elements, forming a “deductive type”. The two types are shown predicate-centered, topic-comment, attribute-prepositioned in Chinese and subject-predicate, attribute-post positioned, long-sentence-deductive type and conjunction-deductively-functioned in English.In sentential element distribution, Chinese language belongs to parataxis, and English is hypotaxis. Under the influence of synthetic thinking and analytic thinking, the sentential elements of Chinese sentence are more omitted, but English less omitted. The omission of Chinese sentential elements can be compensated by the factors in context with the opposite of English. The main shows of the omission of Chinese sentential elements are more omission of elements, more condensed sentences, more idioms and more recessive conjunctions, while in English, sentences are composed of complete elements, and there are plentiful inflectional endings, more collocations, and more dominant conjunctions in cohesion.In interpretation of sentence meaning, Chinese sentence meaning is multi-cognitive, and English sentence meaning is single-cognitive. Under the differences, Chinese sentence meanings are dynamic and the interpretation of meanings have to be worked out with all factors working in a wide-context, while English sentence meanings are static and the meanings can be interpreted with all elements of the sentence participating in a narrow-context.All in all, on the basis of thinking theories, linguistics, contrastive linguistics and cross-cultural linguistics, this thesis makes a deep study of Chinese and English sentence structures, sentential element distribution and meaning interpretation by comparison, analysis, empirical analysis and case study, and furthers the forms and mechanism of the influence of the differences. Through the study, we will know and master the different features and the principles of the two languages, and the study can bring something new to the contrastive theory between Chinese and English, providing valuable references to Chinese language teaching and translation.