Abstract
Comparison is a cornerstone cognitive process that enables individuals to draw parallels and contrasts between entities or events, facilitating comprehension and evaluation. The expression of comparison varies across languages, reflecting the diverse ways in which human cognition categorizes comparative relationships. This study focuses on four languages—English, Chinese, Russian, and Turkmen - to investigate the similarities and differences in the pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic characteristics of comparative constructions. Through an in-depth analysis of the linguistic mechanisms of comparative constructions in English, Chinese, Russian, and Turkmen, the research provides valuable insights into the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variations in expressing comparison. Based on the analysis of online English, Chinese, and Russian corpora, respectively COCA, CCL, RNC, and a self-built Turkmen corpus data, this article conducts a contrastive analysis of comparative constructions in English, Chinese, Russian, and Turkmen, delving into their similarities and differences in terms of pragmatics, syntax, and semantic characteristics. The similarities are mainly manifested in the pragmatics of morphological and analytical comparatives, a high degree of asymmetrical syntactic distribution, and deletion phenomena in the overall semantics of comparative constructions in these four languages. The differences mainly manifest in the pragmatic frequency of morphological and analytical comparative constructions, the syntactic surface and word order of comparative constructions, and the explicit and implicit degree semantics of comparative constructions in English, Chinese, Russian, and Turkmen.
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