A Study Of The Translation Of Chinese Serial Verb Constructions In Cao Fangzi

Serial verb construction, a particular language phenomenon in Chinese, is widely adopted in political texts and literature works. It is characterized by two or more verbs are used together as predicate and have subject-predicate relations with the same subject or topic.This thesis reviews the previous studies over Chinese serial verb constructions first, including its definition and scope; and then obtains the characteristics of Chinese serial verb constructions, that is, all the verb items describe the same subject and the grammatical form is parallel and coordinate, but the semantic and logic relations are complicated. Also, the study over translation of Chinese serial verb construction is introduced.Based on the author’s translation practice of Cao Fangzi, one of the Cao Wenxuan’s masterpieces, this thesis aims to generalize some translation methods. Firstly, from two principles of temporal sequence and primacy sequence, the various semantic relations between verb items of serial verb constructions in Cao Fangzi are thoroughly investigated. For the temporal sequence, there are continuous relation, synchronous relation and simultaneous but no relation. Based on the primacy sequence, the semantic relation can be classified into successive relation, relation of purpose, relation of cause-effect, relation of evaluation and so on. In translating Chinese serial verb constructions, corresponding methods should be adopted according to the different semantic relations. For the concrete translation methods, the most frequently used is paralleling all verb items with "and"; the other is to choose a core verb as predicate according to the semantic relations between verb items in serial verb constructions, then, with abundant English lexical forms and inflection, render the rest ones into appropriate forms.The analysis finally comes to the conclusion that in dealing with translation of Chinese serial verb construction, one should have a clear classification of the various semantic relations and adopt the translation skills flexibly.