Our school is located in the west of China. (CHE)
My school is located in New York. (STE)
There is no distinction between singular form and plural form, while variation of number and determiner are indispensible in English. For example:
The Chinese sentence “你有铅笔吗?” can be translated into 6 versions.
Have you got pencils? Have you got a pencil? Have you got the pencils?
Have you got the pencil? Have you got any pencil? Have you got some pencils?
3.2 Intuitive Thinking vs. Rational Thinking
The Chinese make use of feelings to conciliate since they know natural principles cannot be relied on. Their thoughts take both the principles and feelings into consideration and what people do is required to be in accordance with the proper feelings. The Chinese thinking lays much emphasis on intuition in which comprehension and feelings play an indispensable role. In contrast with Chinese intuitive thinking, Western people persist in rational thinking. Unlike Chinese ancient sages such as Confucius and Mencius who focus on ethics and politics, humanity, virtue, justice, and wisdom, western philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, Locke and Piaget among others developed the tradition of desiring for knowledge, exploring nature and pursuing truths. Step by step, the scientific rational thinking which aims to draw a logical conclusion by means of analyses, judgments and inferences came into being. With the influence of different thinking modes, the Chinese attach more importance to parataxis, while westerners emphasized hypotaxis.
It is widely accepted that parataxis, as opposed to hypotaxis , is a major feature distinguishing the Chinese language from English, with Chinese showing paratactic prominence and English hypotactic prominence. Parataxis favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions (Net.1). The American Heritage Dictionary defines hypotaxis as “the dependent or subordinate construction or relationship of clauses with connectives” (Net.2).
Parataxis-the peculiar feature of the Chinese language can be explained by the synthetic patterns of thought and the fuzzy logic that characterize the mental habit of the Chinese. Hypotaxis-the characteristic feature of English is the natural consequence of the philosophical traditions of Western people and the formal-logical pattern of their mode of thinking.
The Chinese language is coherence-oriented, with their preference over intuitive insight. Sentence-arranging and idea-conveying process is clearly indicated in English. Yet, the logical connection is implicit in Chinese language, thus producing parataxis and hypotaxis in Chinese and English respectively. The author would like to take two sentences as examples:
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