A Comparative Study Of English Actually And Chinese Qishi From Functional Linguistic And Pragmatic Perspective

This paper makes a comparative study of adverbial conjunctions in both English and Chinese discourse.On the basis of Functional Linguistic Theory and Pragmatic Theory,it analyzes the typical types of the adverbial conjunction Actually and Qishi(其实..)based on the selected corpora.Actually and Qishi are frequently used in text or discourse,especially in spoken discourse.They are both adverbs which also carry the function as cohesive ties in text or discourse,so they belong to the word category of adverbial conjunction.Since adverbial conjunctions belong to a complex word category which is in a transaction zone between adverbs and conjunctions,some scholars have realized the significance of the research of adverbial conjunctions.Still,single pair of adverbial conjunctions in English and Chinese remains to be studied.Actually and Qishi can be equivalently translated to each other in both languages,they are similar in some aspects.Due to the different language features and grammatical restrictions in English and Chinese,there are some differences between the function of these two words.The paper is based on a large amount of data selected from two corpora,the syntactic position,the semantic relation and pragmatic functions of Actually and Qishi are discussed respectively.By comparing the syntactic positions,semantic relations and pragmatic functions,the similarities and differences between Actually and Qishi are analyzed.There exist some principles in the use of Actually and Qishi in different dimensions which are attributed to the unique language features of English and Chinese.The data are selected from two corpora in the study,which are the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)and the Corpus of Chinese Linguistic(CCL).Base on the selected data,theoretical analysis on three dimensions of the adverbial conjunctions Actually and Qishi is made.Through the syntactic analysis,the similarities and differences between textual functions and interpersonal functions of the two words are found.The logic-semantic relations and the pragmatic functions are also discussed.Quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are combined with the data to explain and analyze the characteristics and functions of both words.Findings are as follow: Syntactically, Qishi is most frequently used in the initial position, then in medial position. When it appears in the final position, its meaning and word category has changed. English Actually frequently appears in medial position, then in initial position. The frequency of Actually appearing in final position is far more often than that of Qishi. Semantically, they both carry an adversative meaning in sentences, which can either indicate negation or partial negation to correct previous information or express an unexpected opinion. They can also be used to introduce or add new information to previous statement. There exist some principles in the cohesive mechanism of both Actually and Qishi, and the semantic patterns are discussed. Pragmatically, the study is based on the theory of Discourse Markers, Actually and Qishi can be topic transition marker, focus marker, truth insistence, negative marker and face threatening mitigator.