A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF IMPERSONAL STRUCTURE IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES

The research aims at providing a comparative study of the impersonal structure (e.g., NG_L ^ VG ^ NG structure) by using data from Chinese, English, Hungarian, Burmese and Persian and construing the linguistic phenomenon from the cognitive perspective. A typological approach is used for the cross-linguistic study. Results show that when translating the impersonal structure from Chinese into other four languages, the structure can be best preserved in Hungarian while partially preserved in Burmese and Persian. However, the structure has to be completely changed into passive voice structure in English if we do not add any expletive subject to make the sentence complete. The author concludes that grammatical structure is closely related to speakers’ perception of the world, which might explain the similarities between languages within different families.