From the perspective of systemic functional linguistics, this article conducts a contrastive study of the Chinese language phenomena like “eating canteen”and their English translations, which is aimed to explore the underlying philosophical thinking modes of Chinese and English. First of all, the article defines the Chinese language phenomena like “eating canteen”as grammatical metaphors originating from the tension between the semantic and lexicogrammatical strata. It is argued that such grammatical metaphors can be further divided into experiential metaphors and logical metaphors, and it is found that there are no such corresponding metaphors in English. Then the article explores the semantic and syntactic characteristics of grammatical metaphors concerning the Chinese language phenomena like “eating canteen”and their English translations, and finds that Chinese and English show differences in the mode of subject-object relationship in terms of code-choice, coding, decoding, and cognition. Based on the interpretation of the traditions of Chinese and Western philosophical thinking, this article suggests that the essential difference between the two languages is that Chinese is featured by the integration of subject and object while English is featured by the separation of subject and object.