A Contrastive Study Of The Syntactical Structures Of Chinese And English Based On Chinese Bare Nominal Independent Adjunct

The bare nominal element serving as an independent adjunct is a peculiar feature of the Chinese language.This independent adjunct,while modifying a complete sentence in most cases,leads and governs the sentence itself.The current studies of this linguistic phenomenon reveal that such a syntactic structure can show some peculiarities of the Chinese language in terms of its grammatical construction and pragmatic usage.However,a contrastive analysis of its distinctive characteristics in Chinese and English is yet to be conducted,which actually requires a deep and detailed research.This thesis defines and classifies the bare nominal independent adjunct in a sentence,and proceeds to make a contrastive study of Chinese and English.The finding is that there are three main properties of the adjunct:First,it plays a leading role when occurring in the front of a sentence,formally independent of,but at the same time,governing other words,phrases,or clauses in the sentence;Second,it is a normal case that more than one independent adjuncts show up in the sentence;Third,it is usually difficult to identify the semantic logic between the bare nominal independent adjunct and other sentence elements due to the lack of formal links,such as prepositions and conjunctions.Moreover,the independent adjunct of this kind can be further divided into three main categories:the modifier adjunct,the coordinated adjunct,and the complicated adjunct.With contrastive studies of the above-mentioned three categories,the present thesis further analyzes the marked differences between Chinese and English in terms of the relevant sentence structures,and identifies the characteristic features of the two languages,namely,the Chinese trait of spatiality and the English trait of temporality.It can be observed that Chinese tends to lay stress on coherence,while English places emphasis on cohesion,and thus,formal links such as conjunctions and prepositions are rarely used in Chinese,whereas the opposite is true for English.Thus,Chinese sentences often demonstrate a syntactic structure of discreteness and chunkiness,while English sentences,connection and continuity.It is concluded that Chinese is spatially prominent,while English is temporally prominent.To put it another way,Chinese focuses dominantly upon space and English upon time.