Translation Of Hypotaxis And Parataxis From The Pragmatic Perspective

The study on hypotaxis and parataxis is one of the most important research subjects in Contrastive Linguistics, Textual Linguistics and translation as well. Hypotaxis and parataxis are two types of sentence-arranging and idea-conveying construction. Hypotaxis lays emphasis on the formal cohesion; parataxis, on the contrary, the semantic coherence. Their semantic inequality is noticeably realized by syntactic hierarchization. Both hypotaxis and parataxis are recognizable text strategies in English as well as in Chinese. It is generally agreed that English is a hypotaxis-prominent language while Chinese is parataxis-prominent. English puts stress on hypotaxis for its integrity of structure and precision of morphological changes while Chinese on parataxis for its completeness of meaning and expressiveness. Both hypotactic and paratactic expressions can find their profound cultural explanations. It is a tangible result of differences between the two languages in modes of thinking and philosophical tradition. The proper understanding together with their relativity in each language will be of great significance for translation practice. Consequently, as stated in most textbooks, there is a natural conversion in Chinese and English translation, that is, to simply omit connectives from hypotactic approach to paratactic approach in English-Chinese rendition; on the other hand, to add connectives in Chinese-English rendition.However, the use of either parataxis or hypotaxis is not absolute in either Chinese or English. Language users may sometimes adopt the less frequent usage compared to the commonly used devices according to their own language habits. What we believe is that the choice of either hypotaxis or parataxis will be applied is not accidental, but bearing and conveying certain implied pragmatic meanings. The process of using languages is a process of making choices. The choice of language forms manifests the choice of meaning, and a form will grammatically indicate various meanings. Language users, while expressing their intentions, may choose this form rather than that, these hypotactic devices rather than those paratactic ones, or vice versa. Thus, the choice he or she made in their writings will probably possess pragmatic meanings rather than simply semantically meaningful, and the significance of the choices can be fully manifested in terms of certain pragmatic aspects, such as markedness, style and context. It is believed that hypotaxis and parataxis are not obligatory regulations of language systems but pragmatic choices made by language users. That is to say, use of hypotaxis and parataxis may correspond to particular purposes of a particular user rather than to tendencies of a language. The...