A Contrastive Study Of Textual Colligation Between Corresponding Lexical Units In Chinese And English

Corpus linguistics is considered to be one of the most exciting developments in thelinguistic field of methodology. Textual colligation as well as collocation and colligation arekey words in corpus. It has made rapid progress, despite of its young age,.According to Hoey (2005), lexical priming is a new theory of language based on howwords are used in the real life situation, not only their definitions matter, but also theirinteraction with other words. Inspired by the series of researches and papers in the field ofLexical Priming (e.g. Hoey2004a,2005,2007), we notice the rising charm of textualcolligation, which shows that every word is primed to occur in, or avoid, certain positionwithin the discourse. As native Chinese, we care not only the English textual colligation butalso the Chinese one. Based on the lexical priming, this study focuses on six Chinese lexicalunits from a passage which is designed for a re-paragraphing experiment. The textualcolligations of the Chinese lexical units are explored in Torch corpus, a Chinese corpus. Toreceive the English corresponding units of these Chinese units, Mutual Correspondence isused as the standard to identify how much to the extent the words correspondent to theircorresponding units in Babel English-Chinese Parallel Corpus. And the six correspondingunits are confirmed with the same method in Chinese English Online, an online version ofGeneral Chinese English Corpus. Then, the textual colligations of the six Englishcorresponding units are explored in Crown corpus. At last, the textual colligations of the sixpairs of the lexical units are compared and their distributions in different text types are alsocompared.By contrastive research, we get several findings. Firstly, the corresponding lexical unitsin Chinese and English, with the same or similar semantic components, present different textual colligation at sentential level. Secondly, though the Chinese lexical units and theirEnglish corresponding units occur with much different frequency in their native corpus, theyshare similar distribution in different text types. Lastly, the lexical units from the same lexicalcategories show similar frequency in corpus.With several corpus methods used to process words, sentences and texts, this study offersconsiderable suggestions for discourse analysis. The corpus with substantial texts offeradequate materials for discourse analysis and the corpus tools such as WordSmith arepowerful in looking at how words behave in texts. Furthermore, this contrastive study benefitsthe translation teaching and translation activities. For example, the countless translation textsprovide translation examples and to some extent, they can be regarded as convenientelectronic text books. Lastly, this study is a contrastive study of words between Chinese andEnglish at sentence level, which can be a new trend of contrastive study.