A Study Of Structures And English Translations Of Clause-initial Patient Topic-based On Fortress Besieged

The previous researches and studies on topic in Chinese cover several types oftopic, and thus draw pretty general conclusion. Clause-Initial Patient Topic (CIPT) asa prototypical subcategory of topic in Chinese deserves intensive and in-depthinvestigation, but has been rarely touched by far. This study is devoted to thesystematic study of CIPT structures from the perspectives of syntactic categorizationand Chinese-English translation.The study is an empirical study, based on the text of Chi’en Chung-shu’s famousnovel Fortress Besieged. An exhaustive search of CIPT structures from the novel isdone to get a total number of544. We categorize and analyze all these544CIPTstructures to find that the unmarked category is TV structure. We do the same to alltranslation patterns for the544CIPT structures to find that SVO is the mostfrequently used pattern.Based on the above findings, we conduct comparison between the unmarked TVcategory and the most frequently used SVO translation pattern. The comparison isdone in terms of discoursal association mode and information distribution. As fordiscoursal association mode, we take a random sample with a size of85SVOstructures from five successful English novels. Statistics results and analysis implythat O in English SVO structure tends to be rightward associated, which counters tothe leftward association mode of Chinese CIPT (investigated by Tong&Cheng(2009)). The difference causes non-equivalence between these two constituents andstructures in the two languages.The non-equivalence necessitates further exploration of more appropriatetranslation for Chinese CIPT structures and even other topic types and categories. Wehope that future translations will meet the needs of discourse functions as well as ofsyntactic structures. This study is significant in the sense that it contributes topreservation of the unique expressions in the Chinese language during translation.