On The Role Of Logical Connectives In English-Chinese Consecutive Interpretation

Logical connectives, as a set of linguistic devices that signal various kinds ofcoherence relations in a text, are adequately investigated and studied in the field oflinguistics, and text processing and representation in particular. Both qualitative andquantitative studies reveal that logical connectives help the text receiver process thetext more quickly. However, opinions vary when it comes to the effect of logicalconnectives in text representation. Some claim a facilitating role, some suggest noeffect, and some assert a negative effect. Moreover, a close look reveals that theprevious empirical studies mainly use reading tests to investigate the effect of logicalconnectives. In light of the disputes previous studies have over the effect of logicalconnectives and the drastic differences between reading and consecutive interpretation,it is therefore appropriate and meaningful to probe the role of logical connectives inconsecutive interpretation.Through a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods, the role oflogical connectives in English–Chinese consecutive interpretation is experimentallyinvestigated, and some results are obtained: logical connectives play a facilitating rolein E–C consecutive interpretation. Firstly, logical connectives speed up and optimizethe interpreter’s text processing in the listening phase. In addition, they prompt abetter recall in the reformulation phase. Moreover, this study finds out that theinterpreter both takes down and renders additional logical connectives that are notpresent in source language input. In fact, empirical data suggests that additionallogical connectives are a good indicator of the interpreter’s understanding and recallof source language input, thus a good indicator of his performance.