Yanru Yang,Ling Liu

This paper conducts a comparative analysis of the differences in sentence structure between English and Chinese, exploring the "complexity" feature of English and the "conciseness" feature of Chinese as well as their underlying causes. The study finds that English tends to employ multi-layered, nested complex sentence structures with explicit grammatical devices to connect sentence components, while Chinese prefers concise, short serial clauses that express logical relationships through word order and contextual cues. These differences stem from the distinct historical evolutionary paths, cognitive patterns, and socio-cultural backgrounds of the two languages. The research findings hold significant implications for translation practice, language teaching, and cross-cultural communication.

English complexity; Chinese conciseness; Language comparison; Syntactic features; Cultural differences

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