Function And Meaning Of English In-Phrases And Their Chinese Translation

This data-based research examines how English in-phrases are expressed in Chinese. With English grammatical system as the point of departure, a comprehensive study is carried out to investigate the syntactic functions of the English in-phrases and the meaning they express as reflected in their Chinese translation.The study adopts the descriptive framework of Quirk et al (1985) which recognizes roughly 6 syntactic functions of English in-phrases, namely, serving as postmodifiers, adverbials, complementation of a verb, complementation of an adjective, complements and object complements.As our study reveals, the meaning of English m-phrases can be expressed with many Chinese sentence elements, such as predicates, adverbials, subjects, premodifiers, verb complements, parenthesis, subject and predicate phrases, and a sentence. If m-phrases are used just for emphasis, they can be omitted in Chinese translation in line with Chinese linguistic habits. In most cases, m-phrases are expressed with predicates, which accounts for 37.5%. In terms of parts of speech, they can be translated by using Chinese verb phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases, adverbs, attributive or adverbial phrases, adjectives, idioms, personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, conjunctions and a sentence. In-phrases are mostly expressed by Chinese verb phrases, noun phrases and prepositional phrases, each accounting for 37.0%, 24.3% and 13.6% of the total number of cases respectively.The findings from our analysis in the present study lead to the following c inclusions: (1) In-phrases are not necessarily translated into Chinese by using Chinese prepositional phrases. Proper Chinese expressions of them can be found only on the basis of understanding thoroughly the function and meaning of the source language. (2) English in-phrases are generally placed behind the words they modify, whereas their corresponding Chinese expressions take a position in front of words they modify. (3) E glish is a subject-prominent language while Chinese is a topic-prominent language. (4) In English preposition is one of the most active parts of speech in the language, whereas in Chinese verbs enjoy a higher frequency of use.