A Contrastive Analysis Of English-Chinese Pragmatic Word Order And Translation

Word order, as a kind of important grammatical means, has long been studied in linguistics and translation studies. This thesis, based on the Three-dimension theory and other linguistic theories worldwide, attempts to make a contrastive study on pragmatic word order between English and Chinese to seek their differences and similarities and discuss some possible solutions to the realization of the thematic meanings carried by pragmatic word order constructions in the process of mutual translation. Pragmatic word order is of great significance in translation studies, which not only carries the propositional meanings of the sentence but also involves in assisting speakers or writers to communicate pragmatically important information, such as focus, emphasis and so on. "Meaning is at the very heart of the translator's heart". (Hatim & Mason, 2001 : 25) Therefore, in mutual translation between English and Chinese, it is a must to pay much more attention to the pragmatic word order and the realization of the thematic meanings carried by this construction.Chinese is an analytical language and English is a language changing from synthetical to analytical one. They do not possess a high degree of flexibility in the area of word order. To compensate for this, they have developed some useful devices such as topicalization, left-dislocation, inversion and clefs for forming pragmatic word order and allocating certain thematic meanings. Thus in this thesis I will explore differences and similarities of the above-mentioned four constructions: 1) Topicalization. English is atypical in terms of SVO languages. Relatively speaking, nearly all major phrasal categories can be proposed to mark the topic of the sentence, differentiate the old information from the new information or display the speakers or writers' attitudes, emphases and so on. Chinese is regarded as topic-prominent language, in which topicalization is more common. Thus in the process of translation, we choose to preserve the original word order whenever it is possible to avoid suffering the loss of thematic meanings carried by the original sentence structure. As for the differences between the constructions, reversing strategies are available in which the thematic meanings carried by the original sentence tend to be embodied by special morphological devices. 2) Left-dislocation. It refers to a construction in which one noun phrase is proposed and a pronoun that is coreferential with the proposed constituent appears in that constituent's canonical position. Left-dislocation usually marks the topic of the sentence and serves to reveal the writer's emotion or personal instance. Device of dislocation is employed in both English and Chinese. In most cases, structure-preserving strategy is preferred in mutual translation. 3) Inversion. Inversion is very common in English. We usually distinguish the functional inversion from structural inversion because the former, either marking the topic of the sentence or emphasizing the constituents at the final position of the sentence, is a kind of typical pragmatic word order construction. By contrast, only few functional inversions exist in Chinese. In this case, it is necessary to translate literally while alternative options are also under consideration. 4) Clefts. In English clefts consists of It-clefs and Wh-clefts. As far as conveying thematic meanings is concerned, those two constructions play an emphatic role in a sentence. But they emphasize different constituents and put the emphasized constituents in different positions. In contrast with English clefts, "shi" construction is widely used in Chinese language, which is considered as Chinese clefts because it is often used to emphasize certain constituents in a sentence. There is a close similarity between English clefts and Chinese clefts. So it is possible to simply substitute the original cleft construction with corresponding one in cross-language translation. However, it is also understandable sometimes to abandon the original construction to depend on other pragmatic word order or definitely morphological devices to meet the requirements of the idiomatic expressions.The outline of the thesis is as follows. Chapter One is a brief introduction, which deals with the research background, aims, methodology as well as theoretical basis of the present investigation. In doing so, I intend to explore the acceptability of the contrastive analyses of the pragmatic word order between English and Chinese and delimit the scope of my thesis. Then I provide definitions for six important terms -- pragmatic word order, topicalization, left-dislocation, inversion, clefts and thematic meaning to pave the way for further studies. Chapter Two is concerned with critical reviews of previous studies on word order both at home and abroad. Inadequacies of these studies are shown to give justification for the present study. The core of this thesis is presented in chapter three, four, five and six. Detailed contrastive analyses of topicalization, left-dislocation, inversion and clefts both in English and Chinese are carried in these four chapters. Based on their similarities and differences, case studies follow, offering and discussing different possibilities to translate a number of naturally occurring instances of these sentence constructions into Chinese or vice versa. Chapter Seven serves as conclusion, in which I summarize what I have studied in the above-mentioned chapters. Then reiterate the significance of the present study and reveal the limitations and weaknesses of the thesis.In conclusion, the contrastive analysis of the pragmatic word order is of important theoretical significance and applied value. It reveals the commonalities as well as individualities of pragmatic word order between two languages. Surely, it will be helpful to grammar studies and the mutual translation.