A Contrastive Study of the “Subject” in English and Chinese

Abstract: Because of the differences in language, culture and mode of thinking between East and West there exist dissimilarities in the use of the subject of a sentence between English and Chinese. The essay tries to explore respectively the different characteristics and uses of the subject between the two languages which include some differences both in morphology and syntax.

Key words: Subject；translate；mode of thinking；difference

中图分类号： H319文献标识码： A文章编号：1672-1578（2012)03-0006-03

1 Introduction

Without doubt, a sentence is always a unit for people to express something and we usually translate an article sentence by sentence. The subject and the predicate are the main parts of a sentence. When we translate a sentence, the first and also most important thing we should do is to determine the subject of the sentence, then to determine the predicate and other elements of the sentence. However, because of the differences in language, culture and mode of thinking between east and west, there exist dissimilarities too in the use of the subject between the two languages, so it is necessary for us to compare the “Subject” in English and Chinese.

2 The Definition of “Subject”

According to Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English, the subject “ is a noun, noun phrase, or pronoun that comes before a main verb and represents the person or thing that performs the action of the verb or about which something is stated.” (Tom. McArthur: 1991) The Dictionary Contemporary Chinese Dictionary compiled by Wang Tong Yi, gives a definition about “subject”: “The subject as an object of a statement, occurs before the predicate in subject-predicate phrases to answer questions like ‘who’ or ‘what’.”(Wang TongYi: 2001)

3 A contrastive Study of the “Subject” in English and Chinese

3.1Similarities

On the whole, the relations between the subject and the predicate of a Chinese sentence and an English one are much the same in semantic types. The subject of a Chinese sentence, and that of the English one can be divided into three types:

The Agentive subject :the initiator of some action, capable of acting with volition.

e.g. We offered the young man a reward.

我们给小伙子一笔奖金。

The Recipient Subject: the entity undergoing the effect of some action, often undergoing some change in state.

e.g. The young man was offered a reward.

小伙子得到一笔奖。

The Neutral Subject: the subject other than the agentive subject and the recipient subject. In English, it includes the temporal subject, the locative subject and so on. In Chinese, it means that the subject is the object of description, judging and illustrating.

e.g. Yesterday was a holiday.

昨天是假日。

3.2 Differences

However, because English and Chinese belong to different language families, the

Indo-European family and the Sino-Tibetan family respectively, so the subject of these two languages have many differences both in morphology and syntax, which cause a lot of trouble in learning English and mutual-translation.