A Contrastive Analysis Of Transitivity In The English And Chinese Versions Of The Gift Of The Magi

This thesis makes a contrastive transitivity analysis of the short story The Gift of the Magi in both its original version and its Chinese version. Through the contrastive analysis, this thesis aims to reveal the transitivity similarities and differences between the source text and the target text and explore the reasons that lead to them. Also this thesis tries to examine how the selection of transitivity patterns serves the purpose of meaning expression in both languages. The selection of the same or different transitivity processes in the two versions may provide a reference point for the judgment of the Chinese translation. In this sense, the present work may offer another perspective in the translation study.According to Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, language is structured to make three main kinds of meanings simultaneously, or three metafunctions, namely ideational function, which has experiential metafunction and logical metafunction as sub-categories, interpersonal function and textual function. Experiential metafunction is about the natural world in the broadest sense, including experience of the external world, as well as experience in our own minds, describing entities and stating events. It is concerned with the clauses as representations. Experiential metafunction is mainly realized through transitivity or the choice of process type, associating with participant roles and configurations.Transitivity analysis can reveal how language choices are made in the discourse and texts representing the states of being, events, situations and actions concerning the given society and show the preference and manipulation in the representations. Since Halliday’s classic analysis on Golding’s The Inheritor from the perspective of transitivity in1971, transitivity system has been introduced as a practical tool in discourse analysis. However, only a few discourse analyses have been conducted on contrastive study of transitivity between English and Chinese texts. Only Xiao Sishi, under the guidance of Professor Huang Guowen, has made a contrastive analysis of transitivity in the English and the Chinese versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.This thesis selects O.Henry’s The Gift of the Magi and its Chinese version translated by Yuan Ying as the data to make contrastive analysis. It is composed of five chapters.Chapter One provides the background information of this thesis. Besides, it also puts forward the significance and aims of this study. Research methodology is included in Chapter One as well.Chapter Two gives an overview of the transitivity system, including a brief introduction of both traditional and functional grammar’s view on transitivity. Previous studies on transitivity from the perspective of literature, translation and other fields from abroad and home are also be explicated. Researches on contrastive analysis are also introduced.Chapter Three is the theoretical framework of Chapter Four. It elaborates on the development and features of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Transitivity processes including material, mental, relational, existential, verbal and behavioral processes are explained in detail. Other participant roles like range and beneficiary, together with circumstantial elements are mentioned as well.Chapter Four is the most important part of this thesis. It first analyzes the English version which is divided into three parts and their corresponding Chinese parts from the perspective of transitivity system. Through analysis, we can see material process, being the major process in both versions, occupies the largest proportion among the six processes, along with mental and relational processes. This chapter also makes contrastive analysis of the similarities and differences of the two versions, offering answers to the research questions of Chapter One.This thesis finds out the similarities and differences in transitivity in both versions of The Gift of the Magi through contrastive analysis.The similarities can be summed up as follows:the first is in the similar distribution of transitivity types. The majority types in both versions are material, mental and relational processes, while verbal, existential and behavioral processes are the minor types. The target text is in accordance with the source text in the frequency of each process. The second similar feature is reflected in the reversibility of the two participants in the subtype of relational process for identifying. In English, identifying process has the feature of reversibility, and in Chinese the Identified and the Identifier generally refer to the same entity in the real world, hence the two participants are also reversible.Differences in transitivity between the English language and Chinese language are also identified. Firstly, the Chinese transitivity system differs from that in English in the classification of transitivity types and the subtypes of mental process. The second difference lies in the formation of predicate. In English sentences, predicates are based and centered on verbs, and can not be replaced by other forms of constituents like adjectives or nouns; In Chinese, the predicates can not only be verbs but also various constituents like nouns, noun phrases, prepositional phrases, adjective phrases and so on, which lead to different transitivity processes. This difference is most obvious in the relational processes. The third difference is that English inclines to use passive voice and Chinese prefers to convert it to active voice when doing the translating works. This difference changes the positions of participants in a process. Process conversion is the fourth difference, that is, English relational process can be converted to Chinese material process, and English material process can be converted to Chinese mental process. Lastly, English tends to adopt more "stative" words like nouns and adjectives, while Chinese inclines to employ "dynamic" words like verbs and adverbs. As a result, translators may employ different types of transitivity process from those in the source language when they translate. These divergences are the results of various factors. The first one is the grammar: Chinese is a kind of parataxis language, in which connectives are not compulsory; while English is a kind of hypotaxis language, whose sentence structures are very complex and relations between clauses must be expressed by conjunctions. The second one is culture demand:because language serves to satisfy the needs of their users, people from different cultures adopt different language-using habits, for this reason languages are structured in one way rather than another. The third reason is concerned with the translator. The ability and the depth of his understanding of the source language and the target language may lead to different choices of the transitivity types.Chapter Five is the conclusion of the thesis consisting of three sections, mainly summing up the major findings of the study, limitations and suggestions.