Adverb is a kind of important part of speech both in English and Chinese.Although the word-class and grammatical function status of English adverbs which are closer to content words is higher than that of their Chinese counterparts,a contrastive study can still be made between them.They share many similarities but display greater differences in the aspects of classification,word-building,syntactic function,and Adv-N relationship.The main reasons for the differences lies in that English and Chinese belong to two kinds of independent language systems and that English and Chinese people have different ways of conceptualization.A contrastive study on the similarities and differences between English and Chinese adverbs is not only helpful to foreign language teaching and translation,but also beneficial to intercultural communication.