| Discourse is a hierarchical system of clause relations. Generally, the clause in thesystem forms a kind of semantic relation with its adjacent clauses. Therefore, the clause isthe pivot of linguistic analysis. Although scholars such as Winter, Hoey, Halliday&Hasan,Mann&Thompson, Xing Fuyi, Qu Chengxi, Huang Guowen, and so on have describedand analyzed clause relations from different perspectives, there are still some problemswithin the field of clause relation study, particularly in terms of the status quo of researchin English and Chinese.First, the analysis has arrived at the textual level in English; while in Chinese, itremains at the stage of the syntactic exploration. Second, western scholars focus more onthe categorization and description of patterns of clause relations from themacro-perspective; while the Chinese scholars concentrate on the study of the formation ofclause relations, rather than their pragmatic or textual functions in discourse.Through analyzing the features and functions of adversative relations in constructingChinese and English academic journal articles, the current research aims to provide anoverview of how the adversative relation functions in the construction of Chinese andEnglish academic journal articles, particulary the distribution, the classification, therepresentation, the function, and the relation of adversative relation to the problem-raisingmove, as well as their similarities and distinctions in the two languages.The theoretical bases of the current research are contrastive rhetoric, text linguistics(discourse patterns in particular), pragmatic presupposition and language relativity.Acutally, contrastive rhetoric is based on text linguistics as well, and itself is the methodof text analysis. It analyzes the connections between sentences in a text. The discoursepattern is the proper linguistic context of clause relations. It is the combination ofsemantic relations in a text or part of a text. Individual segments of texts are combined toform logical structure of the whole and to form patterns with certain characteristics. Somediscourse patterns reoccur time and time again in text and become deeply ingrained aspart of our culture knowledge. Generally, people have a mutually expected textstructuring or linguistic consensus. To research the adversative relation in a particulargenre, such as academic writings, could provide context to understand and interpreteclause relations and their function in contructing texts. Presupposition is an importanttopic in linguistics, especially in Pragmatics. Strawson has pointed out that everyutterance has a presupposition. Although there is plenty of research on presupposition andits interpretation on adversative relations, systematic analysis is still needed. This study tries to make a clearer analysis on how adversative relations are constructed in light of thetheory of the presupposition, which might benefit a better understanding ofpresupposition theory and the working mechanism of the adversative relation. Languageand thought is closely related. Linguistic phenomenon is the carrier of human thoughts,and thoughts can necessarily reflect linguistic features. The analysis of adversativerelations will in some way explain the general principle of human cognition.Based on corpus, this research is both quantitative and qualitative in nature. First, weestablished a small-sized corpus which contains60articles from English and Chineseacademic journals. Then we labeled the adversative relations in the articles. Next, weclassified the relations into categories and counted their distributions and occurringfrequency of each type by the computer. And finally, on the basis of descriptions, we triedto find out the representations, semantic features and textual functions of the adversativerelations. The main findings are:First, although there are more adversative clauses in English academic journals, theadversative relation is a common linguistic phenomenon both in Chinese and Englishacademic articles; nearly every paragraph contains at least one type of adversative relation.Second, the adversative relations can be overtly or covertly presented in Chinese andEnglish academic journal articles. The overt adversative clauses are represented throughdiscourse markers such as but, however,但是，and so on, or syntactic patterns such asnegative structure; whereas the covert ones are mainly inferred from the languageenvironment. Generally speaking, there are more overt adversative relations than the covertin total. However, for covert relations, there are more in Chinese than in English. Thismight reflect the flexibility of grammar and text structure of Chinese.Third, we divide the adversative relations into six categories. They are oppositverelations, contrastive relations, corrective relations, dismissive relations and hypotheticalrelations. Contrastive relations occur mostly in the articles, while hypothetical relations,the least. The differences between the other four are insignificant. In English, the ratiobetween overt and covert contrast relations is significant different; whereas in Chinese,covert contrastive and corrective relations are more than its overt ones.Fourth, according to the semantic structures, different kinds of adversative relationscould be divided into different types. For example, corrective relations can be divided intosemantic negation and pragmatic negation; concessions can be divided into categoricalconcessive clause and hypothetical concessive clause.Fifth, there are lots of similarities of adversative relations in Chinese and Englishacademic journals. For an oppositive relation, its presupposition is “￢q”, and focus is “q”.For the concessive relation, the presupposition might be “￢q” or “￢p” according todifferent types of concession. For the hypothetical relation, the presupposition is “p2”. Sixth, adversative relations are semantically related to each other, and as a result forma larger semantic unit. The functions of adversative clauses between sentences andparagraphs in Chinese and English articles are similar. The study on the functions and theconstruction progress of adversative clauses reflects the dynamic nature of language. Wehave discovered that the adversative relation is the basic clause relation for“Problem-Solution” pattern, and it is the main method for raising “Problems” in academicarticles both in Chinese and English.The significances of this study can be summarized from the theoretical and practicalperspectives. Theoretically, first of all, we combine syntactic study with textual analysis.Second, we apply presupposition theory into the analysis of adversative relation, whichfills the gap in the field of presupposition study. Third, through the study of adversativerelations, we try to explain the similarity and distinction in thought patterns betweenChinese and English. Language is not only a communicative tool, but also a reality itself.Finally, the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods avoids theshortcomings of introspective analysis in traditional studies and ensures the validity andreliability of the research.Practically, the study proves the importance of adversative relation in the constructionof academic discourse both in English and Chinese. Generally, adversative relations onthe macro-level of discourse play more or less similar functions in English and Chineseacademic articles, but display differences in representing inter-sentential relations atmicro-levels. This finding might give some hints in the understanding of other types ofclause relations in English and Chinese discourse construction. The teaching of Englishwriting to students who are beyond the level of learning sentence construction, it issuggested, should be focused on the analysis of meaning relations between clauses andhelp students use appropriate techniques and connective words to connect clauses andform text comprehensible to English speakers. |
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