Why are branching sentence patterns preferred in English, while linear sentence patterns are preferred in Chinese? （Answer this question in relation to thinking patterns alone.）
Branching sentence patterns in which there are postmodifiers are preferred in English,whereas linear sentence patterns in which there are no postmodifiers are preferred in Chinese.Some scholars turn to thinking patters for a cultural interpretation of this linguistic contrast.They claim that Westerners are good at analytic thinking and therefore have a clearer picture about the relationships between the linguistic items in a sentence. The postmodifiers are generally introduced by relative poonouns,non-finite verbs,prepositions,or subordinate conjunctions which explicitly mark their subordinate status.In contrast,the Chinese people tend to think holistically.They very often resort to temporal or causal relations between acts in a event for word order.Thus linear sentence patterns result.
