A Corpus-based Study On That-Clause In Political Documents

In the era of globalization, communications across borders increasingly involve people around the world. More and more countries have realized the importance of international communication. As many scholars have pointed out, communication is the most important factor in international exchanges. The translation in governmental communication, especially the translation of political documents, has great influence on a state and its international relations. Therefore the study of political documents translation is all the more necessary. The thesis studies That-Clause in political documents by using corpus study,especially the frequency of That-Clause as subject clause, object clause and appositive clause in Chinese official speeches, compared with their usage in American official languages.The appearance of"World Englishes"reflects the fact that English is no longer what it used to be. It no longer limits to American English and Britain English, Canada English, Australian English, etc. We also focus on English in the eastern countries such as Singaporean English, Indian English as well as our own English---China English.Nowadays China has much greater influence in the international arena. And Chinese official speeches are drawing more attention than ever before. The thesis studies Chinese official speeches from the perspective of syntax, more specifically the occurrence of That-Clauses as subject, object, and appositive components of a complex sentence.The structure of the thesis is of four parts: the introduction part introduces the background of political documents translation and a brief review of its previous studies, and the research purpose is proposed.The literature review makes the second part, which reviews related theories on this study, and the most important part of past studies on That-Clause.The third section is the core of the thesis. It starts with the methodology of the research, and the tool, regular expressions, for the data retrieval, and last the research results and a discussion of the statistics.The last part is the conclusion. This part has a summary of the whole thesis and makes a tentative analysis of the research results. And limitations of the thesis are mentioned. Finally the thesis comes to its end.