A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese And English Numerals' Fuzzyness And Translation Studies

Indication of definite quantities of numbers changes in literal works or daily communications. The common linguistic phenomenon has drawn more and more researchers’ attention. According to the consultation of previous studies, this thesis brings in Joanna Channell’s theory on fuzzy numerals, a comparatively new and clear definition of numerals’ fuzziness to compare the similarity and differences of the semantic fuzziness, pragmatic fuzziness of numerals and the cognition.The thesis is divided into four chapters. Introduction introduces the brief review of studies done both at home or abroad, determine the corpus and the specific research methods. Chapter one states four kinds of semantic elaboration in Chinese fuzzy words: semantic source to the precise numeral fuzzy, adjacent or nonadjacent representation of fuzzy numbers and numerals with "a few, many, a few" representation of fuzzy; describes the fuzzy numerals as metaphor, exaggeration and metonymy rhetoric means and pragmatic functions of the two kind. Chapter two states the classification of fuzzy numerals in English, and further expounds the fuzzy numerals’six functions in the pragmatic, metaphor, metonymy, exaggeration, metaphor, the lack of specific information making the communicative success and being just perfect information.Through the integration of the first and the second chapter separately listed in Chinese English numeral semantic and pragmatic vagueness, Chapter three states the semantic similarities and differences between the Chinese and English fuzzy numbers as well as those of cognition background, with the research methods of corpus and a preliminary quantitative research and qualitative research of fuzzy numerals in the corpus, based on the result of use frequency of English numerals in contrast to the similarities and differences between Chinese and English fuzzy numerals in the analysis of pragmatic vagueness, the thesis uses the English concordance software Wordsmith software and Chinese concordance software to do the word frequency statistics. Using the experience and the metaphor cognitive principle of relevance theory and cognitive linguistics, discusses the cognitive basis of these similarities and differences between Chinese and English. Then the thesis underlines the fuzzy analysis of the significance of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Chapter four states when the full functional equivalence cannot be achieved, limits will come into being. There are four limits on different levels of culture, image, sound and form. The thesis found that the differences in culture, formal structure and the semantic fuzziness are three major reasons for the presence of limits in fuzzy numeral translation. The paper put forward four translation approaches to solve these problems.