From The Perspective Of Verbal Causation Patterns To Examine The Two Texts Of The Analects Of Confucius

Causation expression is human being's imitation and generalization of typological causation event in the real world from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. There are two components in causative expressions:one is semantic category, and the other is expression form. As for the semantic category, Saeed (1997) thinks that when an object state changes to another state pressured by something, it may has four states, which can be symbolized as:ADJ1(X),COME-ABOUT(X),CAUSE (COME-ABOUT(X)) and ADJ2(x),Levin&Rappaport (1994,1995) noticed that causation is a important component in causative transitive verbs, and it can be written as [xACT] CAUSE [y BECOME/GO STATE]; As for the expression form, Comrie(1981) has classified causative expression into three types: (a) the lexical, (b) the morphological, and (c) the syntactic type, Goldberg (1995)points out several types of causatives in terms of construction grammar: Caused-motion Construction, Ditransitive Construction, and Resultative Constuction, Therefore, it can be clear that for a long time, causation has been studied from the perspective of grammar structure and lexical meaning, The thesis, on the basis of the western and domestic research achievements, introduces causation into C-E translation.Guiding with the theory of Talmy's verbal lexicalization patterns in"the event of realization"(2000), the thesis borrows the source text of The Analects of Confucius and its two representative translated texts, one is translated by James Legge, who is a sinologists and brilliant missionary in England, the other is Gu Hongming, who is a legend in the translation history of Chinese culture, to research the different verbal lexicalization patterns, which express causation in C-E translation, and also re-recognizes the causation in English. Traditional causation only focuses on lexical causative and periphrastic causative, but in translating practice of causation, translators not only adopt lexical and periphrastic causative, but introduce caused-motion construction, transfer-caused-motion construction, ditransitive construction, resultative Construction and the structure of passive voice and so on. Then, From the above study, it can safely draw the conclusion that based on the different language, culture and thought patterns, translators will use different translation strategies to express causation. Therefore, the translator whose mother language is English will adopt much more word causative as well as some constructions like structure of passive voice, caused-motion construction, etc. besides the traditional periphrastic causative to express causation than the translator whose mother language is Chinese, he/she will use more causative construction to express causation during the process of translation. Additionally, the thesis also indicates that the causative verbs in English have a higher degree of lexicalization than in Chinese.So, how to deal with the causation is still an important topic in the translation studies and can not be overlooked, even though text analysis or discourse analysis is paid great attention to in today's linguistics studies as well as in translation studies. The Analects of Confucius and its two translated texts as materials to explain appropriately the argumentative issue of the thesis that different patterns to show verbal causative do exist between translators. And it also reclaims the important position of word as an translation unit in the practical translation and theoretical research. By the way, this research is expected to shed great lights on C-E translation and also provides enlightenment to foreign language teaching.