A Cognitive Analysis And Translation Study Of Foregrounding Language In Novels

The value of a literary work lies not only in the theme it intends to present, but also in the way in which the theme is delivered. In other words,"what is said"is equally important to"how it is said". The latter notion here is usually dealt with in stylistic study."Foregrounding"is a concept often discussed in stylistics, which denotes the linguistic violation against rules, maxims, or conventions. Ye Zi-nan is the first scholar who introduces foregrounding into translation study. Thousands of scholars follow his step and contribute their shares to foregrounding translation study. Unfortunately, most of the studies take poetic foregrounding as a topic and neglect the foregrounding in novels, which bears its distinctive features. Moreover, most of the studies are restricted to translation field only, without a cognitive, sociological or semiotic consideration which may facilitate foregrounding translation study.This thesis tries to make a cognitive analysis for foregrounding in novels and give feasible translation strategies in the cognitive frame. The thesis first gives an account of some basic theories, including cognitive schema, foregrounding and its classification, the intentions in cognitive translation. These theories serve as a foundation of the study. Then, the thesis inquires into foregrounding from a cognitive perspective. It is noted that foregrounding works by breaking formal, content or cultural schema in readers'mind. In return, reading foregrounding expressions renews and enriches readers'cognitive schema. Moreover, a hypothesis is brought up that foregrounding text intention is a hierarchical system with a series of sub-intentions. It is composed of information-providing intention and stylistic intention at the first level. For foregrounding creation, these two sub-intentions are equally important and closely related to each other. Stylistic intention can be further analyzed into schema-disrupting intention and other stylistic intentions. At the last level is the surface-structure intention, which is much more flexible with multiple choices, serving as the realization of all the above sub-intentions.Theoretically, foregrounded texts should be translated in a foregrounded way so that the original text intention could be preserved. But the huge cultural and linguistic difference between source and target languages sometimes makes it difficult, or even impossible to project a foregrounding text onto the source text. Consequently, translators are supposed to take target texts'acceptability into consideration. On the other hand, the fact that readers are showing more and more tolerance to"strangeness"provides translators with more possibility to maintain foregrounding expressions in target texts.According to the hierarchical structure of foregrounding text intention, the perfect strategy for foregrounding translation is full-value presentation, i.e., to preserve all the sub-intentions of the original or to imitate surface-structure features while delivering message. When that is impossible, translators may go to flexible transformation strategy and resort to other ways to create schema-disrupting effect. In this part, translator's intention plays an important role to some degree. Of course, sometimes the gap between two linguistic systems may set translators able to do nothing about alien linguistic forms. If that is the case, translators have to give up foregrounding expressions and turn to unary translation strategy (message-delivering strategy), which is actually an unfavorable and helpless alternative after all the efforts being given.Based on example analysis, the dissertation provides a tentative study on novel foregrounding analysis and its translation from a cognitive perspective. It aims to add a dimension to foregrounding study and offer a fresh view on its translation.