A Study Of Chinese Adverbial & Its Translation Into English And Portuguese

The dissertation outlines Chinese, English and Portuguese grammar, reviews both trilingual②adverbial literature and trilingual adverbial contrastive literature, and studies distinctions of categorization, composition, word-order of trilingual adverbials. Adverbial modifiers in the Chinese language, based on their verbal information and their semantic relationship with modificand, are normally subcategorized into thirteen categories, namely, time adverbial, place adverbial, degree adverbial, target or object adverbial, limits adverbial, reason adverbial, repeat adverbial, optative adverbial, basis adverbial, approval or negation adverbial, tone adverbial, manner adverbial and mood adverbial.The dissertation, by means of quantitative and contrastive analysis, studies up to more than 2000 sample sentences, with 650 sample sentences presented in the dissertation and others with identical categories of adverbials filtered out, ranged into nine Chinese major sentence patterns (Verbal Predicate Sentence, Serial Verbal Sentence, Pivotal Sentence,把-sentence,被-sentence, Unmarked Passive Sentence, Adjective Predicate Sentence, Nominal Predicate Sentence, Emphatic Sentence) with adverbials of 13 categories and their bilingual translated versions. In the dissertation, syntactic structure is studied by means of sentence constituent analysis. Descriptive adequacy of various transformational phenomena in translated versions is done by observational induction; Similarities and differences are generalized by contrastive analysis; Deductive derivation is introduced due to the aim of explaining the cause of adverbial differences, to find out the linguistic law of translation. It is concluded that firstly, some Chinese adverbials, as a syntactic structure, are retained in their bilingual translated versions,sometimes into both,with or without a change of sentence internal order. Secondly, some Chinese adverbials are transformed into corresponding variants, whose grammatical function disappears while their semantic expression is realized in other grammatical forms, which is a dichotomy in the translated versions. Additionally, some Chinese adverbials are not syntactically equalized in bilingual transtlated versions. Specifically, twelve categories of Chinese adverbial, optative adverbial excluded, may be retained. Time adverbials retained are suggested to be called interlingual time adverbial. Place adverbial of static state may be retained. Other categories of adverbials each contain those which may be retained. Concerning word-order, Chinese adverbials are put at the beginning of a sentence, or between the subject and the predicate. The bilingual adverbials are put at the beginning or end of a sentence, or between the subject and the predicate, which is more flexible, while Chinese adverbials transferred to the end of a sentence are called the complement.Targets of transformation of Chinese time adverbials are the predicate and the attribute. Targets of transformation of Chinese place adverbial are the subject, the predicate and the object. Targets of transformation of Chinese degree adverbial are the predicate, the object, the attribute and the predicative. Targets of transformation of target or object adverbial are the subject, the object, the English indirect object and the Portuguese indirect complement. Targets of transformation of Chinese limits adverbial are the subject, the attribute and the appositive. Targets of transformation of Chinese reason adverbial are the English indirect object, the English subject complement and the Portuguese predicative complement. Targets of transformation of Chinese repeat adverbial are the predicate, the predicative, implied repeat adverbial and the English attribute. Target of transformation of Chinese optative adverbial is the predicate. Targets of transformation of Chinese basis adverbial are the English predicate and the Portuguese object. Targets of transformation of Chinese negation adverbial are the subject, the predicate, the object and the predicative. Targets of transformation of Chinese tone adverbial are the bilingual predicate and Portuguese implied adverbial. Targets of transformation of Chinese manner adverbial are the object, the predicate and the attribute. Targets of transformation of mood adverbial are the English predicative and the Portuguese predicate.The study of transformations of Chinese adverbials in the bilingual③translated versions shows that formation of lexis, division, grammar, conceptualization and language type compose essential factors causing different syntactic morphology of trilingual adverbials. The above-mentioned factors provide a way to explicate the distinctions of syntactic structures and the causations of syntactic transformations, to construct theory of distinctions of trilingual syntactic structures of adverbials, to find out the linguistic law of the perspective morphology of Chinese adverbials in the bilingual translated versions, and to provide inspiration and reference for teaching.