A Study On The Ba-Construction And Its English Realizations

Nowadays, with the revival and development of Functionalism, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics, people have been increasingly concerned about the functions of language—language does not only convey information; it can also imply the speaker's attitude and reflect his/her way of thinking. It is this very situation that has inspired me to study the meaning of the Chinese Ba-construction and its English realizations within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics advanced by Halliday (2004), and particularly, to interpret the meaning of the Ba-construction in three aspects, namely ideational, attitudinal and textual.The Ba-construction has long been studied by Chinese grammarians. Nevertheless, it has scarcely been discussed from the perspective of contrastive linguistics, and to our knowledge, its meaning has never been interpreted in terms of the three metafunctions of language proposed by Systemic Functional Linguistics. Being a unique Chinese syntactic pattern, it does not have an exact English counterpart. However, it does not mean that its meaning cannot be realized in English. Then, here come the questions: What is the genuine meaning of the Ba-construction? And how it can be realized in English? We propose that we need to answer the following three questions before we can truly understand its meaning: 1) What kind of event or situation the Ba-construction can represent; 2) What is the role of the Ba-construction in affecting the expression of the speaker's attitude; and 3) How the Ba-construction behaves in discourse in terms of cohesion and coherence.To resolve the above questions, we adopt the following research path:"hypothesis proposal—empirical investigation—conclusion". First of all, we make some general hypotheses about the integrated meaning of the Ba-construction. Inspired by cognitive linguistics, we believe that the meaning of the construction is distinctive from those to which it can be transformed. We also believe that among various types of the Ba-construction, there is a prototype surrounded by some variant types. On the basis of these general hypotheses, we further make some specific ones concerning the ideational, attitudinal and textual meanings of the Ba-construction: 1) Ideationally, it expresses causative situations; 2) Attitudinally, it reinforces the speaker's attitude; 3) Textually, it provides referent that carries on the topic chain in discourse on the one hand, and on the other hand, it tends to appear in a contrastive/emphatic context.After making these hypotheses, we begin to construct frameworks for empirical investigation and design research procedures. This study adopts as its research frameworks Talmy's (1976) semantic theory of causation, Martin's (2003) Appraisal Theory and discourse measurements for topic continuity developed by Givón (1983). Guided by these frameworks, we proceed to design a series of observational variables with a view to describing the ideational, attitudinal and textual meanings of the Ba-construction in discourse. We also take in some variables for describing the syntactic features of the Ba-construction in order to observe the behaviors of the Ba-construction in discourse in a more comprehensive way. Besides the variables for describing the Ba-construction, we also design variables for describing the English data. The empirical investigation starts from collecting language data. This study is corpus-based. The data come from self-made Chinese-to-English translation corpora and an English-to-Chinese parallel corpus provided by Prof. Lu Wei. The self-made translation corpora are of two kinds: one has only one version of translation; the other collects two versions of translation. We abstract from these three corpora 1186 instances of the Ba-construction and their corresponding English expressions. Among them, 647 instances are from Chinese-to-English Translation Corpus I, 270 from the Chinese-to-English Translation Corpus II and 269 from the English-to-Chinese parallel corpus. Over these collected data, we proceed to scrutinize the behavior of each concerned variable and assign values/levels to them. After that, we can observe how various variables behave among the data and come to the following major conclusions:1) On the ideational level, various types of the Ba-construction constitute a continuum which basically represents causative situations with its prototype representing"agent causation". The other types of the Ba-construction may represent"instrument causation","author causation","causing-event causation"and two non-causative situations, namely"undergoer situation"and"purpose situation". In English, there are a variety of syntactic patterns which can represent causative situations, and the ones that are most commonly found corresponding to the Ba-construction in the data include SVO, SVOA and SVOC.2) On the attitudinal level, the Ba-construction can be regarded as an appraisal device used for reinforcing the speaker's attitude. Such amplification can also be realized in English through extra"explicit appraisal lexical items","attitudinal lexis", and"marked syntactic patterns".3) On the textual level, the Ba-construction provides text with two main topics, its subject being a primary topic and its object a secondary one. Both of them are normally chain-medial topics, which contribute to textual cohesion However, another presumption about the textual meaning of the Ba-construction is not supported by empirical investigation. It turns out that the construction does not tend to appear in a contrast/emphatic context. Correspondingly, English linking adverbials which indicate contrast/emphasis are seldom found in the collected data.In addition to those endeavors of ours, this study also tries to unveil the peculiarity of the construction's meaning by digging out its semantic/cognitive features in representing causative situations. We believe that it is the feature of [foregrounding caused-event-figure +] that accounts for the difference between the Ba-construction and some other Chinese syntactic patterns which can also express causation. Meanwhile, we point out that the peculiarity of the Ba-construction lies in its opposition to its alternative syntactic patterns. When it is impossible for the Ba-construction to transform to those patterns, its so-called peculiarity no longer exists any more and its [foregrounding caused-event-figure +] feature is greatly weakened. Accordingly, its pragmatic function and discourse behavior can also be affected.The originality of the present research lies in these aspects:1) It pioneers a study of the Ba-construction from the perspective of contrastive linguistics. With its meaning as the basis for contrastive analysis, the present work may promote our understanding of the Ba-construction on the one hand, and help us find out how it can be realized in English one the other hand. 2) It is the first attempt ever to have defined the meaning of the Ba-construction in three aspects in the light of the three meta-functions proposed by Systemic Functional Linguistics. 3) It studies the Ba-construction in discourse by using a comprehensive set of theoretical frameworks, which are adopted from functional and cognitive linguistics. 4) It is corpus-based, and values data description and quantitative analysis from a multitude of angles. Despite its various limitations, this research initiates a new approach to the study of special syntactic patterns in Chinese by adopting a multi-functional point of view and a perspective of contrastive linguistic. In addition to its theoretical significance, the present research will also shed light on practical aspects, such as the translation of the Ba-construction and second language teaching.