英语句式与汉语句式的区别
我们先来读一读最常见的汉语句子：“许多夫妻因为错误的理由结了婚，结果在10年、20年或30年后才发觉他们原来是合不来的。他们在婚前几乎没有花时间去彼此了解，忽视了严重的性格差异，指望婚姻会自然而然地解决各种问题，我们希望避免重蹈覆辙。”如果我们要求大家将这一段汉语翻译成英语，你可能会写出若干个短句子，比如说：
➢ Many couples marry for the wrong reasons.
➢ They only find out ten，twenty，or thirty years later that they were incompatible.
➢ They hardly took the time to know each other before marriage.
➢ They overlooked serious personality conflicts.
➢ They expect that marriage was an automatic way to make everything work out right.
➢ We wanted to avoid the mistake.
如果我们真的那样翻译，那么这些短句子组成的段落就是“披着汉语皮的英语”，也就是我们常说的“Chinese English”。实际上，英语句子多是长句，而不是像汉语一样由小分句组成。用一个形象的比喻就是英语像“大树”，“树干”就是主句的“主谓宾”，而“枝条”就是其附加修饰成分，比如说定语从句、状语从句等。其实，上面那段中文翻译成英语可以用一句话来表示：
We wanted to avoid the mistake made by many couples of marrying for the wrong reasons，and only finding out ten，twenty，or thirty years later that they were incompatible，that they hardly took the time to know each other before marriage，that they overlooked serious personality conflicts in the expectation that marriage was an automatic way to make everything work out right.
这个长句我们可以这样来分析它：
We wanted to avoid the mistake（主句）
● made by many couples（过去分词短语做后置定语，修饰mistake）(https://www.daowen.com)
● of marrying for the wrong reasons（介词短语做后置定语，修饰mistake）
● and only finding out ten，twenty，or thirty years later（finding out和marrying并列）
√ that they were incompatible（that引导find out的宾语从句）
√ that they hardly took the time to know each other before marriage（that引导find out的宾语从句）
√ that they overlooked serious personality conflicts in the expectation（that引导find out的宾语从句）
● that marriage was an automatic way to make everything work out right（that从句在名词后，做expectation的同位语）
这个句子大树般的逻辑关系图如下：
可以看出，对于英语句式的拆分，就像把大树的树干和枝条拆开的感觉一样。拆下枝条后，我们就可以把每一个小分句翻译成汉语，所以汉语就是竹节般的语言，是由一根一根竹节直线式地连在一起。每一根竹节就相当于英语的枝条，而英语的枝条则是长在树干上的。这就是英语句式和汉语句式的不同。
英语句子的阅读过程，从根本上说，就是将枝条拆离树干，并搞清楚枝条和树干的关系的过程。理解了汉语句子和英语句子的根本差别，就等于理解了英语句式分析的精髓。