A Contrastive Study On Pragmatic Functions Of Discourse Marker Anyway In Two English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

Hong Lou Meng is the summit of classical Chinese novels.It has been translated into several other languages including English.Amongst the English translations are two well-known versions,David Hawkes’ The Story of the Stone and Yang Hsien-yi’s A Dream of Red Mansions.The study of its English versions and international communication are important parts of redology.The current study investigates the pragmatic functions of the discourse marker anyway in Hawkes’ and Yang’s versions of Hong Lou Meng,from the perspective of relevance theory.The research aims to contribute to the further development of Hong Lou Meng translation studies and its international communication.Since the publication of Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English(1916)and that of Schiffrin’s Discourse Markers(1987),scholars have become more interested in the study of discourse markers.Thus far many scholars have studied them from various perspectives,including semantics,diachronic development,language acquisition,and cognitive linguistics.Anyway is one of the frequently used discourse markers.However,there has been scant research on it,and the insuffcient number of studies were only limited to anyway as a contrastive marker.This thesis aims to study anyway further than its pragmatic function as a contrastive marker by comparing the different usages of anyway in Hawkes’ and Yang’s versions of Hong Lou Meng.In order to analyze the pragmatic functions of anyway,the author collects the linguistic data from The Story of the Stone and A Dream of Red Mansions.There are two reasons for the choice of the two versions:1.Hawkes’ version is the world’s first English version of Hong Lou Meng,which is familiar to most Western readers.Yang’s version is the most well-known and popular English version of Hong Lou Meng translated by Chinese scholars.2.Hawkes is a British sinologist,thus is relatively familiar with Chinese culture.And Yang is a Chinese translator.Their way of thinking is to some extent similar.Therefore,it is feasible to compare their versions of Hong Lou Meng.The present study intended to answer three research questions:(1)What pragmatic functions would the discourse marker perform in each translated text?(2)How frequently would anyway be used in the two English versions of Hong Lou Meng?(3)What would be the differences between the usage patterns of anyway in the two versions of Hong Lou Meng,and what causes would be there behind the differences?Based on Diane Blakemore’s application of relevance theory and her extensive research of discourse markers(1987,1989,1992),this study used relevance theory as the theoretical framework for analysis and interpretation of linguistic data.By searching the keyword anyway from the Parallel Corpus of A Dream of Red Mansions built by Shao Xing University,the author retrieved 227 items of relevant data in total.Among them,there are 116 items in Hawkes’ version and 61 in Yang’s.Then the author used Microsoft 2003 to further organize the data to show the effect of balance.Finally,a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis is utilized to reasonably explain the data.The findings are as follows:(1)In all retrieved data,pragmatic functions of the discourse marker anyway include elaborative marker,proposition strengthening marker,truth digging marker,topic change marker,topic summary marker,turn taking marker as well as face saving marker.(2)In Yang’s version,the corresponding proposition of each pragmatic function is 23.0%,11.47%,13.11%,4.90%,31.14%,3.27%and 13.11%while in Hawkes’version,the proposition is 31.33%,8.43%,1.20%,19.28%,24.70%,14.46%and 0.60%respectively.The above data shows that pragmatic functions of anyway differ sharply in the two English versions.In Yang’s,topic summary marker takes up the largest percentage while turn taking marker takes the smallest percentage.In Hawkes’version,elaborative marker accounts for the largest percentage,while face saving marker the smallest.(3)The possible underlying reasons for the above presented differences are mainly the difference in the mode of thinking and personality diversity between the Easterners and the Westerners.The significance of this research is mainly reflected in two aspects.In a theoretical sense,this thesis further studies pragmatic functions of the discourse marker anyway in a much broader sense by using relevance theory.In practical terms,the findings of this study benefits our understanding of the language features and the plot and characters of the novel and to some extent may slightly contribute to the further development of Hong Lou Meng.