A Data-driven Study Of The Use Of "Meiyou"Comparative Constructions And Their Correspondent English Expressions

Comparison is one of the widely-used categories in linguistics, which has been studied universally by linguists. This thesis regards "meiyou"(没有)comparative construction which is formed with "meiyou"(没有) or "mei"(没)as symbols. This construction in question, a sub-category of comparison, is a characteristic construction of Contemporary Chinese. Although a great many studies on the "meiyou" construction have been done by scholars both at home and abroad, there still has not been a quantitative research on the use and the translation of the construction. Based on what has been achieved by other scholars on Chinese "meiyou" comparative patterns, this thesis attempts to explore the use and the correspondent English expression of the notion of comparison of the "meiou" comparative construction through a small corpus of five C-E novels and five E-C novels. According to the results of the thesis, the total number of the constructions with comparisons of superlative degree is larger than that with comparisons of similarities and differences in all the ten Chinese novels (five original Chinese novels and five translated Chinese novels), with more constructions with comparisons of similarities and differences in the C-E novels, but much more constructions with comparisons of superlative degree in the E-C novels. There are various ways of English expressions conveying the notion of comparison, including certain words or phrases containing the notion of comparison.The thesis comprises five chapters altogether. Chapter one is the introduction of this thesis, which introduces the origin, objective and significance of the study as well as the organization of the thesis. Chapter two summarizes and makes briefly comments on previous foreign and domestic researches on Chinese categories, Chinese and English comparative constructions,"meiyou" comparative construction and other related comparative constructions. Chapter three states the research questions, the research instruments and the data collection process of this thesis. Chapter four is devoted to the quantitative study of use and the English correspondent expression of the notion of comparison of the "meiou" comparative construction. Chapter five is the concluding part, which summarizes the major findings of the thesis, the limitations of the present study and proposes some suggestions for further studies.Hopefully the results of the thesis will enrich the study of E-C and/or C-E translation, and can be of some help to foreign language teaching, translation practice and computer natural language processing.