Course title

Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese

Instructor

WANG Yina

Course goals

Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese is a course designed for the graduates in the broad area of Linguistics and Literature studies. It aims to familiarize the course attendants with the basic ideas and methods in contrastive studies, and enable them to conduct contrastive researches of English and Chinese at different levels of linguistic analyses. This course gives a focus on the synchronic analyses of the key topics in English-Chinese contrastive studies. It is hoped that the students can develop an understanding of the central differences between the two languages, discover the existing problem(s) in this field, and cultivate their own solutions to the problem from a new perspective.

Topics

The course mainly consists of 10 topics

1) Basic principles in contrastive studies (2)

2) Typological features of English and Chinese (2)

3) Contrasting basic structural features (2)

4) Contrasting basic semantic features (4)

5) Contrasting clause expansion patterns (3)

6) Contrasting word order regularities (4)

7) Contrasting possessives and their usage patterns (3)

8) Contrasting impersonals and their usage patterns (4)

9) Contrasting cohesive and coherent patterning (4 )

10) Contrastive methodology (2)

Assessment

Term paper, and class reading presentation

Reference books

Chesterman, A. Contrastive Functional Analysis. John Benjamins, 1998.

Gonzalez, M. et al. Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics. John Benjamins, 2008.

Scollon, R. et al. Contrastive discourse in Chinese and English．Foreign language Teaching and Research Press, 2000.

潘文国，《汉英语对比纲要》，北京语言文化大学出版社，2002。

许余龙，《对比语言学》，上海外语教育出版社，2000。

课程讲义及读本（自编），《英汉对比语言学研究》，2012。

Working language

English

Notes