A Corpus-based Event Semantics Analysis On English Structure "a/an+Adjective+V-er" And Justification For Its Chinese Translation

Phrases like “a big eater”,“a good sleeper”,and “a key player” always appear in English sentences.Some translate them as “yi ge fan liang da de ren”,“liang hao de shui mian zhe” and “yi ge guan jian jue se”,others translate them as “neng chi”,“neng shui” and “fa hui guan jian zuo yong”,etc.In terms of these two translations,the former one is reasonable as it is obviously equivalent to the source language in form,then why is there translation of the latter one? Which translation on earth is closer to the semantic meaning of the source language? In other words,in which circumstance should the former one be used,and in which circumstance should the latter one be used? In terms of the questions above,this paper does an analysis from the perspective of event semantics,and explores whether the semantic meaning of Chinese translations is equivalent to that of the source language of English “a/an+Adjective+V-er” structure.If not,then what kind of translation strategy should be adopted in such occasion.Event semantics is an important branch of formal semantics,aiming to show the meaning of action sentences in a formal way and to study grammatical phenomena from “event” perspective.“Neo-Davidsonian Analysis”,developed from “Davidsonian Analysis”,is more widely used not only in common action sentences containing verbs,but also in sentences that have no obvious verbs but still have action meanings.In this paper,the “Neo-Davidsonian Analysis” is used to do the event semantics analysis based on the data searched from corpus.In this paper,the bilingual corpora of five examples of English “a/an+Adj+V-er” structures searched from the BCC English-Chinese bilingual corpus are taken as the research object,containing 565 English source sentences and 565 Chinese translation sentences.Through the event semantic analysis of the corpus data,it is found that most of the collocations of this structure in English source language has action meaning,accounting for 78.6%.They express the nonintersective reading.The semantic meaning of the rest collocations is static and expresses the intersective reading,accounting for 21.4%.However,as for the translations from BCC,most of them are static and express the intersective reading,accounting for 81.1%,while only 18.9% of them have action meaning.It means that the semantic meaning of the Chinese translations is obviously not equivalent to that of the source language.The reason why this occurs is that the translator is influenced by the source language and manipulated by the principle of least effort.To this end,this paper proposes four Chinese structures that can be used as the translations of English “a/an+Adjective+V-er” structure: 1.(Yi Ge)+Adjective+Noun;2.Four-character Verb Phrase;3.Verb+(Adjective)+Noun;4.De Predicate-complement Structure.The first structure is static,while the other three are structures with action meanings.They are respectively used as the translation of the collocations source language with static meaning and action meaning.