A Contrastive Study Of Syntactic Interfaces Of Causative Between English And Chinese From The Perspective Of Force Dynamics

"Causative" has always been the focus of linguistic research,especially the causative structure,causative semantic elements and causative verbs.Talmy proposed the "force dynamics" systematically,which greatly enriches the research perspectives at home and abroad.Force dynamics refers to how entities interact with respect to force.It is a generalization of the traditional notion of "causative".At the same time,it also includes "causing","letting","helping" and so on.Under the concept of force dynamics,causative structures show different syntactic forms between English and Chinese,and the interface between syntax and semantics is worthy of in-depth discussion.Based on Talmy’s force dynamics and TED English Chinese parallel speech corpus,this study obtains 200 pairs of English and Chinese parallel sentences of "make" and "let" respectively with the help of BFSU paraconc 1.2.1 and concordance randomizer 1.25.After the manual selection 39 pairs of "make" sentences and 41 pairs of "let" sentences are the targeted materials.Taking the "make" and "let" typical periphrastic causatives structures as examples,this study adopts the method of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis and the contrastive method between English and Chinese,and analyzes the syntactic and semantic interface relationship of causative structures and translation characteristics in English-Chinese translation texts.It aims to find the differences and similarities of the causative structures between the two languages as well as the reasons why that happens.It is found that the correspondence of causative verbs in the category of "causing" and "letting" is unbalanced in English-Chinese translation;there are obvious differences in the sentence patterns,syntactic forms and semantic role relationships of the category of "causing" and "letting" in English-Chinese translation;the force dynamics model of typical periphrastic causative sentences of the category of "causing" and "letting"in English-Chinese translation is similar;the inherent characteristics of English and Chinese and translation features lead to the different sentence patterns and syntactic forms of the category of "causing" and "letting";the construction and understanding of force dynamics patterns in EnglishChinese translation is mainly influenced by cognitive metaphor and metonymy.This study can not only enrich the existing achievements in domestic practical studies of force dynamics and the contrastive studies of causative in English-Chinese translation texts,but also provide a new research view and cognitive motivation for English teaching of causative expression and translation.