Comparative Study: Similarities And Bilingual Differences

1. Introduction
1.1 A Brief Introduction to the Contrastive Study
Since all human languages are tools of conveying people’s thought and means of communication, they are all have universals and also are within a same theoretical system. It would be helpful to study a new language if you know some same mechanisms or structures among all languages. And the comparative study is the best way to search for universals among these languages. However, due to the differences also exist between languages, compared with a comparative study; the contrastive study is more effective and comprehensive. It not only finds similarities but also highlights any real differences that exist between languages in order to identify and appreciate those aspects unique

Besides the commonalities, each linguistic structure of a language has its own characteristics.”(Wang Dechun, 1997:1) every language has its own features which distinguish itself from others. The distinguishing feature is manifested not only in the fact that a construction in one language may be different from another, but also in that the same construction occurs in different languages with different frequencies. English and Chinese are two relatively developed languages in the world, but they belong to two different language family: since English belongs to the Indo-European family and Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family respectively, many differences do exist. Contrastive study comes to grips with the kind of similarities and differences between two languages and thus provides an alternative way for the two languages’ learners. It is also an effective approach in foreign language learning and teaching because we can predict and describe the patterns that will cause difficulties in learning, and those that will not cause difficulties, by comparing systematically the language and culture to be learned with the native language and culture of the

The focus in this paper is primarily on the positions and functions of adverbials, adverbials positions in sentences are flexible, which doesn’t indicate the randomness, because the positions of adverbials both in English and Chinese are closely related to the literal meanings or the implications of the sentences. As a part of speech category, the term “adverb” applier to an exceedingly diverse set of items, including modifiers of verbs, adjectives, adverbials, clauses and sentences. The term “adverbial” extends the range to prepositional phrase, noun phrases and clauses, all of which may have the same modifying functions as adverbs. The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to contrast the sentence-initial adverbials between English & Chinese; second, to discuss the adverbials at the final positions in English and Chinese sentences. All of the surveys are controlled by the way of contrastive