A Contrastive Study On Repetition Category Between Chinese And English

Repetition category plays an integral and essential role in human’ cognitiveprocess, yet its notion is verbalized differently in different languages. Previous studiesfocused mostly on the description of some repetition adverbs within syntactic,semantic or pragmatic domains. Actually, repetition can be expressed by verbs as well.This paper attempts to systematically investigate the expressing forms of repetitivecategory and thus offer a broader, contrastive study on Chinese and English repetitionadverbs from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives and on repetitive verbsfrom the angle of morphology. The major findings are:(1) In semantics, the repetition category can be classified into single-timerepetition and multiple-time repetition, or repetition of behavior, state and event. Inexpressing forms, it comprises two categories. One is lexical items including adverbsand verbs and the other is grammatical items embodying reduplication and prefix re-.Lexical items are abundant in Chinese; in contrast, grammatical means are far moredominant in English. During those repetition expressing forms, Chinese adopts moreforms to express multiple-time repetition while English single-time repetition.(2) Chinese adverbs of repetition category are much more in amount and muchmore complicated in usage and function than those in English. Quantitatively, Chinesehas twelve adverbs of this category while English only has four. Semantically, thoseChinese repetition adverbs, except for repetition meaning, can express addition,frequency, coexistence, etc. while English ones do not. Syntactically, Chinese ones arerelatively fixed in position and have strict selections to verbs while English ones arequite flexible, which occur not only in the mid-position, but also in the front or at the end. Neither did the selection to verbs. Pragmatically, those Chinese adverbs containspecific tenses, which is the reason why Chinese adopts them to express past, presentor future tenses. In contrast, English tends to employ grammatical tenses. In addition,Chinese adverbs expressing single-time repetition cause pragmatic ambiguity due touncertainty of semantic orientations while in English except for those adverbsexpressing single-time repetition, the adverb expressing multiple-time repetition aswell as the adverb phrase may also cause the same phenomenon.(3) Both Chinese and English repetition verbs morphologically vary in the wayof Morphology in Broad Sense (MBS). The difference lying in the morphology ofChinese verbs is reflected on combination of words or relations among words whilethat of English verbs mainly on inflections of verbs themselves, but under somecircumstances it is reflected on combination of words.(4) In Chinese-English translation, the differences between single-timerepetition and multiple-time repetition in expressing forms determine translationmethods adopted. The single-time repetition expressing in Chinese adverbs is mostlytranslated into adverbs, verbs or those in the form of re-, or the adverb phrase oncemore or once again. The single-time repetition expressing in Chinese verbs are inmost cases translated into the corresponding repetition verbs in English. Themultiple-time repetition expressing in Chinese adverbs can be translated intorepeatedly or reduplications of adverbs, and reduplications of verbs in Chinese areusually translated into corresponding verbs in semantic meaning.This study is of both theoretical and practical significance. In theory, thiscontrastive study has shed some light on the respective features of Chinese andEnglish repetition category as well as morphology. In practice, this research may be ofgreat help tolanguage teanching as well as translation between Chinese and English.