Abstract:Abstract: This article makes a contrastive study of the distribution of Adjuncts in English and Chinese clauses from a functional perspective, aiming to reveal syntactic distributive particularities of the two languages and to provide relevant explanations. The results show that there are few differences between the distribution of English and Chinese interpersonal and discoursal Adjuncts while there are significant ones between the distribution of English and Chinese experiential and logical Adjuncts. These particularities are due to the different characteristics of English and Chinese in terms of word order, to the different ways of cognitive prominence between Chinese and Western nationalities, to the different modes of thinking, i.e. attaching importance to rationality or to intuition, and to the differences between Chinese and Western cultures and their breeding environments, in turn.
Key words: English clause; Chinese clause; adjunct; syntactic distribution; contrastive study