A Comparative Study On Viewpoint In Chinese And Korean

This thesis investigates the viewpoint in Chinese and Korean. Viewpoint in language is associated with the cognitive structure of the language user. In linguistic encoding, viewpoint is directly reflected by the subject and the topic. This thesis offers a comparative analysis of viewpoint in Chinese and Korean mainly based on the animacy property of the subject and the topic in the two languages.Chapter1introduces the research method and the subjects of the study, namely the subject at the sentence level and the topic at the text level. This chapter also reviews the literature on the related researches, and introduces the corpus used for this study.Chapter2introduces the theoretical framework of the study. First, the meaning of viewpoint in linguistic encoding is discussed from the perspective of functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics and from the aspect of viewpoint expressions in individual languages. Second, the animacy hierarchy and the related linguistic phenomena are introduced. Third, the cognitive-pragmatic issue of voice is discussed, and the classification of voice used in this thesis is proposed, which are active, passive, and causative. Forth, the textuality and coherence are discussed, and the analytical model of the topic is introduced.Chapter3provides a comparative analysis of the linguistic phenomenon of passive in Chinese and Korean. Through the analysis, the present study finds that when a passive construction is translated from Chinese into Korean and vice versa, the sentence structures are rendered different in the two languages. The passive in Chinese is translated into the active and the passive in Korean; the passive in Korean is translated into the"transient"construction as well as the active and the passive in Chinese, and the percentage of the former is relatively high. This thesis proposes that the difference between the two languages is due to the difference in their subject selection mechanism, namely the difference in viewpoint. This is also reflected in the animacy hierarchy of the subject in the two languages:the animacy hierarchy of the subject is relatively low in Chinese, while it is relatively high in Korean.Chapter4provides a comparative analysis of the linguistic phenomenon of causative in Chinese and Korean. This thesis subcategorizes the causative into resultative causative and ordering causative. This paper points out that the Chinese causative focuses on the resultative causative, while the Korean causative focuses on the ordering causative. Because the causer in the ordering causative must be an entity with a high degree of animacy, subjects in the two languages display different degrees of animacy. Through a corpus analysis, the present study shows that the sentence structures of causatives and their translated sentences do not correspond to each other in the two languages:Chinese often uses an inanimate causer as the subject of a causative sentence; Korean, however, uses an animate causee as the subject of a non-causative sentence in the corresponding expression. This thesis proposes that it is mainly due to the difference in the subject selection mechanism of the two languages, namely the difference in viewpoint.Chapter5discusses the agentive and non-agentive sentences in Chinese and Korean. In an objective situation, there should exist an entity that can transfer force, and this paper calls it an agent, and a sentence in which an agent acts as the subject is called an agentive sentence; an entity that cannot transfer force is called a non-agent, and a sentence in which a non-agent acts as the subject is called a non-agentive sentence. The animacy of the subject is different between the agentive sentence and the non-agentive sentence, which brings about the difference in viewpoint in linguistic encoding. Based on a corpus analysis, this chapter finds that non-agentive sentences occur more frequently in Chinese than in Korean. Accordingly, this paper argues that Chinese has the viewpoint "based on the non-agent".Chapter6conducts a comparative analysis of topic ellipsis in the two languages at the text level. This paper finds that topic ellipsis occurs more frequently in Korean than in Chinese; the distance between a zero topic and its referent is longer in Korean than in Chinese; it is common in Korean that a zero topic and its referent is intervened by another topic in the topic chain, while it is rare in Chinese. The reason is that the animacy of the topic in Korean is higher, and there exists a main topic whose cognitive representation is very stable in Korean, while, in Chinese, the animacy of the topic is not so high, and there doesn’t exist a main topic either.Chapter7is conclusion and summarizes the important findings of this thesis.