Linguistic Realization Of Disjunctive Relations In English And Chinese

Disjunctive relations in human languages are an important type of logico-semanticrelations which can be captured by the truth-functions of disjunction in propositionallogic. Taking a relativist stance towards language and logic, the study aims to investigatehow disjunctive relations are linguistically realized on the basis of a DIY English-Chinese bidirectional parallel corpus, which is composed of Lao She’s novel RickshawBoy and its English translation by Howard Goldblatt, and Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’sAdventures in Wonderland and its Chinese translation by Chao Yuen Ren. A thoroughinvestigation is carried out into the DIY corpus in order to explore a number of issuesincluding1) the conceptual basis of disjunctive relations,2) the compatibility of disjuncts,3) the interactions between disjunction and other truth-functional connectives includingnegation, conjunction, implication, and equivalence, and4) the various linguisticmanifestations with the overt and covert existence of disjunctive markers. Thus acontrastive study of linguistic realization of disjunctive relations in English and Chineseis made by providing a comprehensive description of the various types of disjunctivesentence pairs and testifying the assertions of Langacker (2009:355) and Chao Yuen Ren(2002:799).The main findings are as follows:First, it is argued that uncertainty constitutes the conceptual basis of disjunctiverelations. The concept of uncertainty can provide a unified account of different linguisticmanifestations of disjunctive relations, which include the facts that both English andChinese disjunctive markers can denote rephrasing, that there are inherent connectionsbetween disjunctive statements and particular statements in Chinese, and that A-not-Astructures and numeral juxtapositons can be grammaticalized into yes-no questions andapproximations respectively.Second, like the logical connective of disjunction, the disjunctive markers in naturallanguages are also inclusive by default, whose exclusive reading is motivated by thepragmatic factor of scalar implicature. The judgment of whether disjuncts are compatibleor not is ultimately dependent on what disjunctive marker is used and whether theexistential imports of disjuncts are experientially compatible. Third, despite the tendency of changing disjunctive markers in different sentencetypes, contrary to the current views held by the scholarly circles, the corpus findingsreveal that Chinese disjunctive markers containing “huo或” can be used in negativesentences and regardless-condition sentences under certain conditions, and that “haishi还是” can also be found in declarative sentences indicating things yet to be known.Fourth, an extended corpus search shows that against the assertion of Chao YuenRen (2002:799),“bushi不是p, jiushi就是q” is only a common way of expressingdisjunction in Chinese, which is far from being the most frequent. The correlative marker“bushi不是p, jiushi就是q”, which expresses the disjunctive relation while taking theform of implication, entails a logical equivalence between disjunction and implication.Heavily influenced by the yin-yang dualism in Chinese thinking, the componetialstructure of “bushi不是p, jiushi就是q” captures the essential inference process ofdisjunctive syllogism.Fifth, existential statements containing “youde有的” and “youshihou有时候” inChinese can be sometimes translated into disjunctive relations in English, and Chinesesentences containing “huoshi或是” can be expressed by “one… the other…” in English.These two facts verify the validity of the conversion of disjunction and particularpropositions, whose philosophical foundation lies in the notion of possibility arising fromthe process of analyzing a variable whole into individual wholes.Sixth, juxtaposition is an important Chinese way of expressing disjunctive relations.Parallel juxtaposition, negative juxtaposition, A-not-A juxtaposition, and numeraljuxtaposition are the four main types of Chinese juxtapositional way of expressingdisjunctive relations. It is noteworthy that it is acceptable to use reversal numeraljuxtaposition to express approximation in Chinese while it is not allowed to do so inEnglish, for which tentative explanations are provided.The last three findings can collectively lead us to argue that a contrastive study ofdisjunctive relations in English and Chinese may help to reveal the different thinkingstyles and habits of expression embodied in the two languages.