A Comparative Study Of The Linguistic Features Of Chinese And Spanish Proverbs

Proverbs are the essence of a nation's collective wisdom and the accumulation of the nation's culture in the long history.They record the changes which brought by the development of society and reflect the cultural connotation of different nations.There are a large number of proverbs in Chinese and Spanish,which highly summarized the experience of the people in their daily life and labor.The dissertation mainly studies the linguistic features of Chinese and Spanish proverbs.Firstly,the paper is classifying the prosodic features of Chinese and Spanish proverbs.Both Chinese and Spanish proverbs emphasize the rhythm.Chinese proverbs feature end rhyme with neat antithesis of sentence patterns.The rhythm changes are highlighted through the level and oblique tones.There are more forms of the rhythm in Spanish proverbs.The alliteration,the full rhythm,the internal rhythm and the middle rhythm are the parts which are different from the Chinese.In addition,Spanish proverbs rely on the accent,stressed and light words to achieve the changes of rhythm.Secondly,the Chinese and Spanish proverbs are compared from lexical aspects.It is found that the vocabulary of Chinese and Spanish proverbs is characterized by colloquial and epochal character,using synonymous substitution and antisense contrast.When the Spanish proverbs replace the synonym,the sentence structure also tends to change.However,the sentence patterns of the Chinese proverbs don't change.This is the biggest difference between Chinese and Spanish proverbs in terms of vocabulary.Then,the dissertation analyzes the syntactic features of the Chinese and Spanish proverbs.It is common that subject implied in the single sentences of the Chinese and Spanish proverbs.There are also sentences without verbs in the Spanish proverbs to imply the predicate.In the complex sentences,the Chinese proverbs mostly link the clause to the main sentence through semantics.However,the Spanish proverbs use the relatives and the conjunctions to connect the sentences.Finally,the Chinese and Spanish proverbs are analyzed from the perspective of metaphor.By comparing the metaphorical classifications of the two different proverbs,it is found that the metaphors in Spanish proverbs are more connotative,including the metaphors,trope and personification of Chinese.Moreover,the paper also studies the basis of the similarities and differences between Chinese and Spanish proverbs from the perspective of culture.