A contrastive study of the Chinese and Japanese mood type systems

Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to contrast the Chinese and Japanese mood type systems and their realizations following the network developed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is found that: Chinese and Japanese show similarity in the delicacy of the mood type systems, but Chinese has established a more prominent status for unbiased polarity seeker and the choice of content than Japanese does; the two languages display shared features in the use of Mood particles, qualitative and quantitative groups, the alternation of word orders, and the use of certain structures for Mood realization, and they differ in basic word orders, the preferences for certain grammatical patterns, and the prominence in depending on vocabularies and morphological changes. The findings are rooted in the functional and typological prominences of the two languages, which may further shed light on interpersonal communication patterns in the two societies.