A Corpus-based Research On Lexical Chunks Used By Professional Interpreters In Chinese-English Consecutive Interpretation

Following a steady growth of scholarly interest and activity over the past forty years,phraseology has now become a major field of theoretical and applied research for linguistics,including two research paradigms: theory-driven and corpus-driven.The corpus-based phraseology was first proposed by Sinclair(1991),and then Altenberg(1998)was regarded as the milestone in this paradigm.He proposed to adopt a rather non-committal approach to the problems of fuzzy feature of‘pre-patterned' expressions(‘lexical chunks' in this study)with a large range including collocations,fixed and semi-fixed expressions,idioms,incomplete phrases and etc.,and examine the phraseology of language on the basis of frequency of recurrent word-sequences in corpus.The corpus-based phraseology has become an important research direction and provided a practical method for other linguistic research directions,such as language teaching and translation.In the fields of psycholinguistics,neurolinguistics,second language acquisition(SLA),and interpreting studies,previous researches have proved that lexical chunks are beneficial to interpreting.Yet corpus-based research on the lexical chunks in interpretation is rare and mainly focuses on students' interpretation.And the results based on those research lack of representativeness of professional interpretation.On the other hand,due to the limited availability of Chinese-English interpreting corpus,all the comparative studies are confined to the contrast between students' interpretation and native speakers' spoken English.Although they share the same nature of spoken English,there are many big differences between these two kinds,which will make the conclusion of comparison unrepresentative.This dissertation has constructed a professional consecutive interpreting corpus(named CECIPC)and provided a descriptive research on CECIPC.Based on the research paradigm and framework proposed by Altenberg(1998)and the comparison among CECIPC,Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners---Spoken(PACCEL-S)and London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English(LLC),this dissertation aims to explore the use of lexical chunks by professional interpreters in consecutive interpretation with a dual purpose: the first is to study the overall patterns,structural classification and different functions of lexical chunks used by professionals;and the second is to propose a method of constructing an open interpreting multimedia archive and discuss the importance of material processing before research.The results indicate that at aformal setting,generally,professional interpreters tend to use large amounts of lexical chunks.But compared with the variety of lexical chunks used by native speakers in spoken English,the chunks used by professional interpreters are of consistency and uniformity.According to the categorization of lexical chunks based on structural standards,some categories that are common in spoken English are absent in interpretation.In addition,another key finding in the comparison is that the structural category of lexical chunks with the largest proportion is discrepant among those three corpora.The most commonly used structural type by professional interpreters is single clause constituents,different with the data of both students' interpretation(incomplete phrases)and native speakers' spoken English(multiple clause constituents).And based on the structural categorization,lexical chunks are further classified with functional standards.From the study,many categories of lexical chunks,though lack of grammatical completeness,are routinized and conventional,and their frequency are found context dependent.As CECIPC is a consecutive corpus,there are 729 segments all together,which are divided into two groups,namely long segments and short segments,based on the average length.Through a Chi-square test on these two groups,the results indicate the positive correlation between the frequency of lexical chunks and the length of segments,and the difference is marginally significant as well.At last,conclusions,values and contributions,pedagogical implications,limitations and outlook are discussed on the basis of all the major findings.