A Contrastive Study On Function Words Of English "And" And Chinese "He(?)"

"He" and "and",as the most frequently used function words in modern Chinese and English respectively,have been a research hotspot among scholars at home and abroad.Most studies on "he" focus on the judgement of its part of speech,its coordinate components and the comparison with other conjunctions in Chinese.As to "and",scholars often lay stress on its coordinate structures,its semantic features in sentences as well as its pragmatic functions.However,few studies involve the contrastive analysis of the two words,especially the syntactic features between them.For this reason,quantitative,qualitative and comparative approaches are adopted to probe into syntactic properties of "he" and "and",including their grammatical functions,connected components,and the syntactic features of the coordinate structures.Since word class system exerts a huge influence on syntactic structures in a language,the existing observation of word class typology will help to explain syntactic features of the coordinate components with "he" and "and".There are three main questions to be answered in this thesis:(1)What are the syntactic features of Chinese "he"?(2)What are the syntactic features of English "and"?(3)What are the similarities and differences of syntactic features between "he" and "and"?It is found that "he" and "and" present marked differences in their grammatical functions.In prepositional phrases with "he",objects are assumed by nouns,verbs and adjectives since all these word classes possess referentiality,and they together make up the Chinese super-noun."He" prepositional phrases serve as the adverbial.When "he" is used as a conjunction,the components that it connects are words or phrases either of the same word class or of different word classes.The syntactic features of coordinate components display an inclusive pattern of Chinese word classes.However,as a conjunction,English "and" has to connect words of the same word class.English word classes are specified."And" is more powerful in terms of syntactic levels of the components to be conjoined because of the fact that "and" connects not only words or phrases,but also sentences,while "he" just juxtaposes words or phrases.However,the word class of "he" is more flexible and its coordinate components fall into various syntactic categories.The two function words display a skewed relation.The fact that English belongs to rigid word class system while Chinese is flexible is the main cause of different words' syntactic functions in the two languages.For one thing,this thesis compares "he" and "and" from the perspective of their grammatical functions,and for another,it focuses on the components before or after them.This study can make up for deficiencies in previous researches and provide new perspectives and paradigms for the study of function words.In addition,this research will be helpful in language teaching,Chinese-English translation and cross-cultural communication.