Abstract: Since Comparative Construction is shared by all natural languages including English and Chinese, comparative studies among the languages are necessary. Based on the collection of corpus and the research results of predecessors, this paper gives a systematic and a detailed comparative study of Chinese “bi” and English “than” constructions at the syntactic level. First of all, it summarizes the relevant research of predecessors, the research content of this paper and the basic format of Chinese “bi” and English “than” constructions, and then makes a comprehensive contrasting of the comparative constructions of the two languages from the three parts of the Comparative Terms, the Comparative Markers and the Comparative Result in order to explore the differences between them, in particular to explore their differences.

Key words: Chinese “bi”；English “than”；the Comparative Terms；the Comparative Markers；the Comparative Result

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Research Status-1

1.2 Corpus Source and Research Method-3

1.3 Research Material-4

1.4 The Basic Format of Sentence “bi” and “than” Constructions-5

2. The Comparative Terms in Chinese and English-6

2.1 Symmetry-6

2.2 Asymmetry-10

2.3 Summary-13

3. The Comparative Markers in Chinese and English-13

3.1 The Comparative Markers in Chinese-13

3.2 The Comparative Markers in English-15

3.3 Summary-16

4. The Comparative Result in Chinese and English-17

4.1 The Composition of W-17

4.2 Part of Speech-19

4.3 Syntactic Constituent-21

4.4 Summary-22

5. Conclusion-23

References-24