A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF IMPERSONAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES

Abstract

The research aims at providing a comparative study of the impersonal constructions (NPLOC ^ VP ^ NP) by using data from Chinese, English, Hungarian, Burmese and Persian and analyzing the constructions from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. A typological approach is used for the cross-linguistic study. Results show that when translating the impersonal constructions from Chinese into the other four languages, the construction can be best corresponded to Hungarian and Burmese. However, the English and Persian equivalents of the certain Chinese impersonals are in the passive voice. I conclude that grammatical structures are closely related to the speakers’ perception of the world, which might explain the similarities between languages within different genealogical background.

Keywords

• impersonal constructions
• locative constructions
• word order