Contrastive Analysis On Transitivity In English And Chinese

Transitivity is linguistically realized in different ways from one language to another. Despite that, it is a commonly regarded universal notion and plays an extremely important role in all human languages. Linguists both at home and abroad have done a lot of research related to transitivity, but their studies are mainly confined to one aspect of transitivity, such as ditransitive constructions, middle-constructions, or from different perspectives with different approaches: some are pragmatic; some are functional; some are discourse-oriented. This study, based on prototype theory proposed by Eleanor Rosch and Croft's Event View, from the cognitive perspective, comparatively examines each class of clauses in English and Chinese in the light of semantic and morphsyntactic parameters.According to Hopper and Thompson (1980), transitivity is believed to be a continuum from intransitive to transitive but not a clear-cut binary category as defined by the traditional grammar. Transitivity is a grammatical category centered around a group of semantic and syntactic properties. The prototypical transitive clauses have most of the deciding properties, and the non-prototypical transitive clauses lack these properties more or less. The former is usually with high degree of transitivity and the later with relatively low degree of transitivity. Through detailed analysis of prototypical and non-prototypical transitive, intransitive and non-transitive clauses in English and Chinese, we find that there are universal and language specific features of transitivity in the two languages.For prototypical transitive clauses, both languages demonstrate almost the same semantic properties such as a volitional, active agent, an independent affected patient and a non-durative, bounded and realis verb. Besides, both of them show the typical transitive clause pattern—NP1+Vtran+NP2. However, Chinese has its distinct features for prototypical transitive clauses. The overt perfective aspect marker le (了) following the verb or verb phrases means the completion of the action which is one of the semantic properties for prototypical transitive clauses. And ba (把)-construction with the pattern--NP1 ba (把) NP2 VP, typical of Chinese, should be classified into central transitive clauses because of its high transitivity.For non-prototypical transitive clauses, we compare the two languages from three aspects: agent, patient and verbs. Then, we analyze passive clauses in English and Chinese, as passivization is one of the syntactic properties for transitive clauses. As a result, we find in Chinese the condition for passivizability seems stricter than that in English, while the linguistic expression for passive meaning in Chinese is more flexible than that in English.When analyzing the intransitive and non-transitive clauses, we find there are great resemblances between the two languages. In addition, we compare two special constructions as non-prototypical intransitive and non-transitive clauses respectively, namely, middle construction and existential construction. Middle constructions which can be seen as the overlap of transitivity and intransitivity are in active syntactic form but semantically express a passive meaning. Chinese existential construction is with the formula: Phrase of space/time + V + zhe/ le+ Nominal Phrases". Its English counterpart is"There + V + Nominal Phrase (+ Phrase of space/ time)". For each of these constructions, we will reveal the similarities and differences between English and Chinese, which is also the aim of this study—to present a comprehensive picture of transitivity in English and Chinese.In this study, the prototype theory shows its theoretical advantages and actual application to a great extent. Through contrastive study, the universal and language specific properties of linguistic expression for transitivity in English and Chinese are revealed. That will help us better understand the nature of transitivity and the two languages as well. This study is bound to be of some theoretical and practical value, which will provide a useful reference for foreign language teaching and English-Chinese translation. However, it should be noted that linguistic phenomena are extremely complex, and this thesis cannot cover all those issues. There remain many problems for further study.