A Contrastive Study Of The Chinese And English Version Of Wolf Totem From The Perspective Of Hypotaxis And Parataxis

The issue of parataxis and hypotaxis has been for a long time attracting people’s (E.A. Nida, Wang Li, to name but a few) interest in both linguistics and translation studies. The study of this issue may indicate some of the distinctive features of the language concerned, and on the other hand uncover both the language conventions and the mode of thought internalized in the minds of language users. However, the earlier studies of this issue are in fact a matter of controversy, expressing different opinions and giving us vague answers. And the study on parataxis and hypotaxis is found, in most cases, to be more in generality and less in concretization. For example, the results of research are more often than not based on different materials from different texts, which, in my point of view, are hardly convincing. It is also noted that the study on parataxis and hypotaxis is dealt with separately and respectively in both translation and linguistic fields, which more or less prevents the study from being carried forward due to lack of cooperation and comprehensiveness.In view of the facts above, a comparative method is employed for the study of this topic. The novel Wolf Totem written by Jiang Rong (whose real name is Lyu Jiamin) in Chinese, and its English version, are taken as the only text for the present study, with the emphasis laid more on differences than similarities according to the basic viewpoint of contrastive linguistics. Attempts are to be made to prove that Chinese tends to be paratactic than English, and on the other hand we hold that parataxis is never at odds with hypotaxis in most cases.The thesis is organized as follows. The First Chapter serves as an introduction to the thesis, in which the literature review, the purpose of the study, and the research methodologies are included. The Second Chapter introduces the definitions of "parataxis" and "hypotaxis". Then, related researches about them are discussed, with some results of some famous linguists. Chapter Three mainly deals with cohesion in terms of parataxis and hypotaxis. Firstly, the notion of cohesion is introduced according to different famous linguists. Then details about the notions of hypotaxis and parataxis are given clearly. What’s more, how cohesion influences hypotaxis and parataxis is discussed, quoting some famous words of Pan Wenguo. At the end of this chapter, three devices of forming a sentence are introduced, i.e. syntactical devices, lexical devices and semantic devices. The next chapter first compares the advantages and disadvantages of hypotaxis and parataxis and then supplies a series of comparison made between parataxis and hypotaxis, focusing on the distinctive features of discourse structure of Chinese and English. In the thesis, a lot of language phenomena are discussed, such as, the implicitness of Chinese vs. explicitness of English, the ellipsis of Chinese vs. addition of English in the usage of conjunctions and sentence structure and so on.We also give an account of why Chinese is more concerned with its inner meaning while English in the completeness of the structure. In the Sixth Chapter, we attach the importance to "the relativity of language", holding that parataxis and hypotaxis usually exist in all the languages no matter what kind of language it is.The conclusion is that although Chinese is a language marked by more parataxis, and yet "the relativity of language" shouldn’t be neglected. These characteristics are worth paying attention to both theoretical researches of translation and translation practice.