3. Syntactic differences between English and Chinese

3.1 Hypotaxis and parataxis

Hypotaxis refers to the words, phrases and the arrange of a sentence are reflected through the dominant logic (Jia, 2012). In other words, it means the means of language forms (including vocabulary means and pattern means). Parataxis refers to the words, phrases and the arrange of a sentence are not reflected through the language forms, but the hidden sentence logic meaning and relation (Jia, 2012). One of the outstanding features is that this kind of language put emphasis on the unseen continuousness, the logic order and function meaning. In one word, we can say, hypotaxis is mainly about the logic relation and the parataxis is mainly about the grammar order. Although these two features both exist in English and Chinese, generally, hypotaxis is more outstanding in Chinese and parataxis is more outstanding in English. Jia (2012), Zhu (2011), Xu (2010) and Li (2007) have mentioned this point. They believe that English is a comprehensive language and more formal than Chinese, the sentence are combined with a rule, so English pays more attention on the forms. The sentence grammatical relations is reflected through the twists and turns of words, and the relationship among meaning group, components and clause is reflected through words (such as prepositions, conjunctions) . Chinese is a kind of paratactic language, the relationship between each sentence is reflected through the logical link and word order. So in the process of English-Chinese interpretation, those unnecessary conjunctions and integrate the sentence in Chinese expression can be omitted. If necessary, the target sentence is needed to be re-arranged, according to time or logical order. In Chines-English interpretation, more words that suggest the flowing of things and some conjunctions that can combine each short expression are used.