Word Order between English and Chinese - Assignment Example

The humor comes from the idea of the biscuits being in the wrong place without explanation.

The second issue is equally far from the expected. By co-operative principle, this answer was not informative and was clearly out of sorts with the person who had asked it. Word order in linguistics is used to refer to studying the syntactic constituents that make up a language. Under many circumstances, correlations between different words do occur. Basic orders of words can be defined by the use of the finite verb (V), object, and subject (SVO). The normal transitive sentence has six possible theoretical word orders. SVO is however basic to all languages of the world which is a basic issue of concern in this discussion. There is however preference for the Chinese and English languages. This section aims to make a comparative and contrasting view of the word order.

Word order in the Chinese language is as important as it is in the English language. From the comparative basis, there is a sentence constituent that follows the SVO order. This however does not bring the implication that the English and Chinese word order is all the same. To start with, in a statement, the structures of these sentences are the same. The subject precedes the verb and the object comes later. This can be referred to as the SVO order. This is just the normal word order in the systems of languages. Take for example the sentence “I learn Mandarin”. In Chinese, it takes the same order of arrangement 我学中文, where我=I, 学=learn, 中文=Mandarin. This is the same order of arrangement of words. The arrangement above simply indicates that there is no problem interpreting the language as far as the order is concerned. There is however a slight difference between verb inflection between English and Chinese. In Chinese, verbs are not inflected. The Chinese language has no past tense, future tense, plural as well or singular form. Consider this example in sentence form:

He goes to the park= tā qù gongyuán
Chinese instead has what can be referred to as the measure words which take the place of some words to depict the actual tense of the sentences being spoken. The Chinese have more use of measure words than English. These are used whenever the noun is used in the numerical order or after the use of determiners ‘this’ or ‘that’. This can be illustrated by the use of this sentence:
‘Two pieces of cake’= liǎng kuài gāo
Generally speaking, therefore, basic structures between the two languages are the same although some components differ depending on the level of complexity that can be used to differentiate the two languages.

Another observation in the language order is that the word order in negative statements is actually in contrast to the statements:
They are not teachers= tāmen (they) + bù (not) + shì (are) + laoshi (teachers).
It can be noted that in English, there is a direct correlation between the negative component and the verb. At all times, ‘Not’ is always put after the linking verbs. This is a correlation that does not exist in Chinese because the negative components have to be put mostly after the subjects and not the verb. In this case, a literal translation would not give the correct meaning of a sentence. Another complication is that in English, there is the use of tenses that are not in Chinese. Auxiliary verbs must therefore be put after the subject before “not” is added. This brings about an order that is different when it comes to negative sentences;

I don’t like exams= wǒ (I) + bù (not) + Xinhua (like) + kǎoshì (exams)
This brings the translation as ‘I do not like exams’ which is not the order in which the English translation brings up. The auxiliary verb ‘do’, ‘does’, or did have no place in the Chinese arrangement.
In the form of an interrogation, the Chinese word order is different from the English aspect. This is related to the rules related to the placement of question words. In Chinese, the question words are usually put at the end of the sentences. Such words as what, who, where, and when are put at the end of a sentence as opposed to the beginning in English. Consider the case below:

What do you say? = 你说什么？
This is a sentence that translates to ‘You say what?’ in Chinese. Therefore there are several variations in the way the word order comes out in any of the two languages.
There are several other differences between the word order in Chinese and English as well as other similarities but it is worth knowing that the SVO is the most important word order aspect that differentiates different languages. Read More