A Corpus-based Study On Polysemy In English Translations Of Tao Te Ching

Polysemy is a pervasive language phenomenon existing in almost all languages.It belongs to the field of semantics,and scholars of linguistics,literature and philosophy have long been interested in the studies of polysemy for centuries.In general,a new word has only one original meaning.However,people need to further explain and recognize the objective world with the development of society,and these words in existence cannot satisfy people's demand to express things.As a result,adding new meanings to the primary one becomes an economical and effective way to meet their demand and the words gradually change from monosemous ones to polysemous ones.This synchronic coexistence of the original meanings and diachronic development of new meanings gives rise to polysemy.Tao Te Ching,a classical work in Chinese traditional culture,has exerted a tremendous influence at home and abroad.Since the last century,more than 100 different English translations of this work have been produced.Due to the fact that these English versions are translated by translators in different eras,various language features occurred in these translations.Nevertheless,most of the existing studies concerning these English versions of Tao Te Ching focus on topics such as translators' subjectivity and translation strategies,and few of the articles make an in-depth contrastive study on the different English versions.Through reading and searching for the versions,the author discovers that translators tend to make a variety of interpretations of the high-frequency culture-loaded words of Tao Te Ching due to the indeterminacy of Chinese ancient language,which brings possibilities to see those different English translations of high-frequency words in the source text as a polysemous category.This thesis aims to conduct a tentative corpus-based study on polysemy in English translations of Tao Te Ching.The translations of the high-frequency words“?”,“?”and“??”will be investigated as a polysemous category,thereafter,the studies of the traditional structural linguistics and prototype theory in cognitive linguistics on polysemy are described systematically to explore the interrelationships of the semantic items in each category.Therefore,the Tao Te Ching English-Chinese parallel corpus which includes 21 full English versions and the Chinese original text annotated by Wang Bi is utilized to conduct an empirical study by combining the quantitative and qualitative research methods.Firstly,through searching in the parallel corpus,there are various translations of each word and the most frequent translations of“?”,“?”,“??”are respectively“The Tao”,“Virtue”,“Non-action”.Then,these translations are assumed to be prototypical in each polysemous category,and the remaining ones are seen as the peripheral translations.Secondly,after looking up for the meanings of these words in Chinese etymological dictionaries,the author finds that the undefinable character“?”in Tao Te Ching is frequently interpreted as the transliteration“The Tao”.Besides,the translations of the remaining words basically correspond to the etymological meanings in Chinese dictionaries.Thirdly,study shows that the peripheral translations can be considered as the derivations of the prototypical translation at semantic level in the category of the translations of“?”,which conforms to the prototypical view on polysemy as well as the radiation process of polysemy.In the meantime,the members in each polysemous category correlate with each other by family resemblance,the prototypical translation stands at the central position and the peripheral translations share part of the attributes of the typical ones;the prototypical translations“the Tao”and“Virtue”respectively belong to the superordinate category and the basic-level category,also,due to the inclusiveness of the translation“Te”,the author advocates that it should be classified into the superordinate category.However,the prototypical effects in the category of translations of“??”are not evident.At last,given that different translators have different understandings and cultural backgrounds,the translations are influenced by many factors,especially the religious elements.Besides,the author insists that the combination of parallel corpus and translation is of crucial significance to the translation of classic.Work that is difficult to complete under traditional conditions is able to be realized and corpus also increases credibility of these empirical studies.As corpus-based methodology is widely accepted,more and more scholars start to adopt it to conduct translation studies.The present thesis makes tentative attempts for the contrastive analysis through parallel corpus methodology,offering a positive reference for future research.