Proposition And Its Representation In English And Chinese: A Contrastive Study

This paper is a tentative contrastive study of English and Chinese from the angle of proposition. It attempts to show that English and Chinese, two poles-apart languages, differ greatly in the ways of representing propositions. Proposition is formerly a term in logic and the beginning of 1960s saw its entering into linguistic field. Being a complex and abstract conception, proposition provokes a variety of understandings. Dr. Larson regards it to be a semantic unit, defining it as "a grouping of concepts into a unit which communicates". On the basis of this specific understanding, the study of proposition in this paper begins.Propositions are essentially the same in all languages: it is the different representations that remarkably differ languages. Different ways of representing propositions in these two languages are illustrated and compared. It is concluded that English has a variety of grammatical patterns encoding propositions, while Chinese has much less. Prepositional analysis serves as a useful tool in translation practice. In English-Chinese translation, the propositions at phrasal level are usually straightened out and recast into a loosely linked text. In Chinese-English translation, the clausal propositions are usually reduced into phrasal ones and embedded into a well-packed sentence.The paper falls into four chapters:Chapter I gives an overview of researches in proposition. The first section outlines a review of the research of proposition in various fields, including logic, philosophy, pragmatics, functional grammar and semantics. In the second section, the viewpoint that proposition is a semantic unit is introduced and studied in detail.Chapter II is devoted to the contrastive study of English and Chinese from the proposition perspective. Different ways to represent proposition in English and Chinese are illustrated and contrasted. The first section deals with the English language. In English, various grammatical units besides simple sentence or clause, such as noun phrase, adjective phrase, prepositional phrase, verb, phrase and absolute construction, etc, can express a proposition. Compared with English, Chinese has fewer ways to represent proposition. In modern Chinese a proposition, in most cases, neatly corresponds to a simple sentence or clause though there are also some minor grammatical patterns encoding propositions.Chapter III searches for E-C and C-E translation strategy on the basis of the preceding contrastive study. A three-step-procedure is proposed: 1) Propositionalizing the text; 2) Identifying the prepositional relations; 3) Restructuring propositions. Besides, in translation, after restructuring, the translator faces a potential choice system in a receptor language. Whichform should be chosen depends on the stylistic and contextual requirements.The last chapter is the conclusion. The author concludes that propositions take on different grammatical units in English and Chinese. Bearing this in mind, people will have a good command of these two languages and produce idiomatic expressions in bilingual and monolingual communication.