Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English Syntax

This book introduces a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English syntax based on generative grammar. It covers major syntactic domains, including but not limited to noun phrases, verb phrases, the inflectional domain, the discourse-related domain and ellipsis. Based on the empirical data drawn from both Chinese and English, and recast in modern linguistic terminology, the book introduces various rules and theoretical modules from the generative framework to analyze the similarities and differences between Chinese and English syntax. The chapters are arranged such that the book moves from the easiest syntactic topics gradually towards the more complex and advanced ones. Each chapter includes a short summary of major points and references for further reading. Readers are not required to have background knowledge in syntax. The book can serve as a textbook or a reference book for scholars of Chinese studies, Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL), Chinese linguistics, comparative linguistics and theoretical linguistics.