| This research investigates the lexico-grammatical properties of thematic choice inChinese and English fictional texts. Based on a self-built Chinese and English parallelcorpus, it compares both originals and translations of the two languages. Themes, as thepoint of departure in clauses, extend from the beginning of a clause to the first experientialelement (Halliday,2000:53). Themes of clauses are selected through unconscious choices oflanguage users and mean more than position concepts (Fries,1983). It is thus an interestingtopic to investigate thematic choice in different texts and languages.This research has two major advantages over previous studies. The existing literature,on the one hand, lacks contrastive studies focusing on lexico-grammatical properties ofThemes. The majority of them prefer to investigate thematic progression on textual level.The current study, however, intends to explore properties of Themes on clausal level. On theother hand, the quantitative analysis based on the self-built corpus complements the existingliterature, most of which are qualitative in nature. The corpus survey and statistic tests makeit possible to obtain relatively credible results.This research intends to answer two questions. What are the similarities anddifferences in thematic choice between English and Chinese fictional texts? What are thesimilarities and differences in thematic choice between originals and translations of Chineseand English fictional texts? Twenty fictions, ten for each language, are selected as sourcesfor corpus building. Altogether400clause complexes are randomly picked out from thesefictions and divided into T-units. In sum, this research collects1,686T-units, consisting of825originals and861translations. The properties of Themes in each T-unit are manuallytagged based on Halliday’s thematic theory, including the concepts of markedness,complexity and transitivity. AntConc3.2.0for Windows is adopted to conduct the corpussurvey. The findings and discussions are concluded as follows. Firstly, Chinese and English fictional texts show all-around differences in thematicchoice regarding the three properties, except for the selection of Actors, Locations andManners as Themes.1) Similarities: CNO (Chinese originals) and ENO (English originals) show nodifference in the selection of Actors, Locations and Manners as Themes. This result accordswith Halliday’s (2004) claim concerning the balance within transitivity system acrossdifferent languages.2) Differences: there exist differences between CNO and ENO in terms of all the threeproperties of Themes.a) CNO contains more marked Themes than ENO in terms of markedness. This islargely due to the Front-weight principle in Chinese. Adjuncts, generally expressingcircumstantial meanings, can be put at the beginning of clauses in Chinese regardless of“heavy heads”.b) With regard to complexity, CNO selects more clausal Themes. The majority ofclausal Themes in this study represent Locations, denoting the experiential meaning ofspace and time. This conforms to the Human-manipulated principle in Chinese, by whichclauses are organized in sequential order such as temporal sequence or spatial sequence. Incontrast, ENO selects more multiple Themes than CNO. The hypotactic feature of Englishaccounts for this difference. In this study, the majority of multiple Themes is comprised of atextual Theme and a topical Theme. Hypotactic languages generally prefer textual devicesto explicitly indicating the connections between clauses.c) CNO and ENO are concluded to differ in selecting Sensers and Carriers as Themesin terms of transitivity. The differences denote that the selected Chinese fictions containmore descriptions concerning the inner emotions or attitudes of Subjects, and that theselected English fictions use more words to depict the static state of characterization andidentifying. The current study holds, however, that it is still insufficient to generalize thisfinding as a major difference between Chinese and English fictional texts before morefictions are investigated. Secondly, the comparison between ENT (English translaitons) and CNO shows thattranslationese exists in English translations in terms of markedness and clausal Themes.1) Similarities: ENT does not differ with CNO in terms of markedness, clausalThemes and transitivity. This study has proved that similarities in transitivity do not meantranslationese. As for marked Themes and clausal Themes, the majority of them representcircumstantial meanings, namely, Location and Manner in this study. Therefore, Englishtranslations should reduce the frequency of circumstantial elements as Themes.2) Differences: ENT selects more multiple Themes than CNO. This means thattranslators have added textual devices to explicitly indicate the connections between clauses.These changes in thematic choice conform to the syntactic rules in English language.Lastly, the comparison between CNT (Chinese translations) and ENO reveals thatChinese translations show translationese in the complexity of Themes.1) Similarities: Themes in ENO and CNT show no difference in terms of bothcomplexity and transitivity. As discussed before, similarities in transitivity are notconsidered as translationese. With regard to complexity, Chinese translations need to lessenthe use of textual Themes. In other words, certain conjunctions and conjunctive Adjunctscan be omitted.2) Differences: CNT selects more marked Themes than ENO. This means thatChinese translations have made changes to move Adjuncts to the thematic slot, conformingto the Front-weight principle in Chinese. |
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