A Contrastive Study of the Logico-semantic Relations and Their Representations between English and Chinese Clauses

This research contrasts the logico-semantic relations between English and Chinese clauses in the dimensions of types and representations of logico-semantic relations in order to reveal the differences between English and Chinese people in terms of cognition.The result shows that in terms of types of logico-semantic relations, in English the enhancement type is the most frequently used while in Chinese the extension type is the most frequently employed.And in English, the logico-semantic relations are often indicated by boundary markers while in Chinese, they are often implied by the semantic meanings between clauses.As for the representation of enhancement, reasons or conditions come after results in English while it is the other way round in Chinese.And as for the representation of extension, boundary markers play an important role in English, but temporal sequence is significant in Chinese.These differences can be attributed to different cognition and psychology between western and Chinese people.Western people lay emphasis on logical reasoning while Chinese on perception and intuition.