A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English On The Basis Of The Linguistic Projection Of Event Structure

Event,a concept borrowed from western linguistics,is now a hot research topic in linguistics and computational linguistics.Among the rich research achievements by west scholars,what is noteworthy is the works by Zeno Vendler and Donald Davidson,who did far-reaching research in linguistics and computational linguistics,respectively.It is based on the research findings of the above-mentioned two scholars that most other scholars both at home and abroad have done or are doing their research work.However,on account of the difference in the research perspective,different viewpoints have appeared,causing much confusion in the definition of the term“event”.In order to explore the nature of event,this dissertation fixes its attention on the three worlds of event research---the objective world,the cognitive world and the linguistic world,with the emphasis directed to the linguistic world.Events in the above-mentioned three worlds can be called objective event,cognitive event and linguistic event,respectively.What this dissertation aims to find out is the rules that govern the projection of events in the objective world,through the filtration of cognitive events,to events in the linguistic world.For a full description of such rules,the dissertation demonstrates its arguments by a comparison between Chinese and English,with important examples sentences chosen from related corpora.The objective event is characterized by objectivity,authenticity,uniqueness and unrepeatability.The cognitive event is humans’ subjective and relatively accurate reflection on the objective event,and its main characteristics are subjectivity,conciseness,and replicability.A further filtration of the cognitive event leads to the linguistic event,which is a record of events in the form of linguistic symbols.If the objective event is seen as one that happens in a real-life situation,the cognitive event can be,accordingly,thought of as humans’ recollection of what happens in the real-life situation.Such kind of recollection is largely based on humans’ cognitive ability and memory.The linguistic event is a stick figure of the cognitive event,and is,in a certain sense,an ethnic-specific description of the cognitive event.Such kind of description differs from ethnic group to ethnic group.The cognition of events can be explored from two levels,the cognition itself and the expression of the event.The event at the cognitive level can be seen from two aspects,i.e.,perception and judgment.The perception of event is the first-step of humans’ understanding of the world.This kind of understanding is achieved through sensory stimuli.However,the understanding of the objective event cannot replace the judgment of the event,which is the further processing and reasoning of perception.In a certain sense,the event at the expression level is the X-rayed version of the event at the cognitive level,which,in the final analysis,is the X-rayed version of the objective event.In other words,the event at the expression level is extracted from X-ray projection for two times.On account of this,the event at the expression level is quite different from the objective event.But generally,the event at the expression level is a comparatively accurate description of the cognitive event from a certain angle of view and in a certain style.Events at the above two levels differ in base point,sequence,completeness and objectivity.The linguistic event is the focus of the research.It is actually the linguistic X-ray projection,or the linguistic extraction,of the objective event for two times,with the cognitive event as the intermediary in between.Such kind of projection is constrained by quite a few perspectives,including the time perspective,the space perspective,the psychology perspective,the style perspective,and the discourse perspective.The modes for the projection include foreground projection and background projection,and the projection is featured by iconicity,conciseness,indirectness,and fuzziness.The perspectives for the linguistic extraction can be classified into two types,extra-linguistic extraction and intra-linguistic extraction,and the grammatical elements for the extraction mainly include words and expression,and sentences as well.In thecourse of linguistic extraction,different languages show different characteristics at both the level of words and phrases andthat of syntax.At the level of words and phrases,the major difference between Chinese and English is that English has a much lower connection between the cognitive event and the part of speech than Chinese.At the level of syntax,exemplified by the verb-object structure that contains the argument of PATIENT and that of INSTRUMENT,the differences are quite obvious.To be more exact,Chinese adopts the double preposition-object structure,i.e.,the patient argument follows the preposition with a dynamic sense,and the instrument argument,the preposition with a stative sense.Comparatively,English adopt the principle of priority for PATIENT in the choice of the direct object,i.e.,of the two participants,the one with more characteristics of the proto-patient is more likely to be the object of the verb,the other being the object of the preposition.From the perspective of linguistic information transmission,the event has flexibility and separability.By flexibility is meant that the degree of information saturation in the linguistic extraction of the event can be different for different purposes.By separability is meant that in the linguistic information transmission the information focus can be given in a complementary manner,independently of the main structure of a sentence.The linguistic extraction of the event takes different linguistic forms,including simple sentence,complex sentence,sentence consolidation,and so on and so forth.