Nominal Abstraction In English And Chinese: A Comparative Study

The abstract and the concrete are a pair of philosophical terms. They are represented in language as abstract and concrete nouns correspondingly. There are a lot of abstract words both in Chinese and English, which have their own grammatical characteristics and ways of word-formation.Nominal abstraction is also one of the areas in morphological investigation. Although the work on nominal abstraction made some progress both in scope and in depth in the last twenty years, the analysis agenda for it is still far from satisfactory, especially in terms of contrastive studies of different languages.In China, Ma Jianzhong first classifies nouns into four kinds, that is, beriming, gongming, tongming and qunming, according to the senses of abstraction and concretion. Later, L Shuxiang(1982), Wang Li(1985), Zhu Dexi(1982) have made classification and description of nouns in different ways. But their theories and definitions about nominal abstraction are not systematic and accurate.Outside China, Chomsky explores and describes nominal abstraction in 'Aspects of the Theory of syntax'(1965) and 'Remarks on Nominalization'(1970) and Halle in ' Prolegomena to a theory of word-formation'(1973) to some extent. Abstraction and grammaticalization have similarity in some respects. Late in 1992 the forefather of modern linguistics A. Meillet uses 'grammaticalization' in his works 'Grammaticaliztion', popularizing the studies of grammaticalization. But seldom comparisons of abstraction between different languages are made in these above mentioned works .In studying these works, the author finds that in Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation, dealing with these abstract words brings some troubles to the translators to some extent. Therefore the exploration and analysis of nominal abstraction is of great significance either in Chinese-English and or in English-Chinese translation.The author demonstrates the abstraction in different hierarchical levels and limits itsdiscussion on the nominal abstraction in this study. Both English and Chinese have numerous ways to form abstract nouns that demand a scientific and systemic classification of all the nominal abstractions in these words. The nominal abstractions are herein classified into phonological, etymological and word-formation abstractions, and then the different abstractions are analyzed respectively.Finally, the author explores the reasons leading to different ways and degrees in forming abstract nouns by means of the comparison of the origins of these two languages and the relationship between language and thinking.