Analysis of the Influence of Differences in English and Chinese Modes of Thinking on Language Expression

Abstract

Language expression is shaped by linguistic structure, cultural convention, cognitive habit, and communicative purpose. Based on a critical review of English-Chinese contrastive research, this paper examines three related tendencies: holistic and analytic orientation, image-based and abstract-conceptual preference, and context-dependent and explicit-linear organization. It considers how these tendencies appear in lexical choice, sentence construction, discourse progression, and pragmatic framing. The discussion does not use broad cultural labels as self-sufficient explanations. Instead, it treats the observed contrasts as variable preferences mediated by genre, context, bilingual experience, and audience. The analysis suggests that effective teaching and translation should connect formal comparison with functional interpretation. Learners need to identify semantic boundaries, recover implicit clause relations, reorganize information for target readers, and adjust politeness strategies and cultural images to the communicative situation. It also explains why formally acceptable sentences may remain rhetorically awkward or pragmatically unsuitable for target readers. Such training can improve accuracy and coherence without turning recurrent differences into fixed stereotypes.