A Comparative Study Of Adversative Adverbial Conjunctions In Chinese And English

This thesis focuses on the comparative study of adversative adverbial conjunctions in Chinese and English,namely,“却”,“反而”,“反�'”,“�'是”,instead,however,only,and conversely,trying to study their syntactic,semantic and pragmatic functions respectively and comparatively.This study is based on a large number of language material selected from CCL and COCA. In the aspect of syntactic characteristics, the thesis employs a quantitative study of the syntactic positions. Furthermore, the qualitative analyses of its semantic and pragmatic functions are done with each function studied extensively and given detailed interpretation with examples.The study finds that adversative adverbial conjunctions in Chinese and English have different syntactic and semantic features,as well as three common pragmatic functions.The major findings are as follows:1.Adversative adverbial conjunctions in Chinese are fixed in their positions,while in English are more flexible.For the preferred order of the numbers of syntactic categories that these words occupy,it can be summarized as:“�'是”>“反而”/“反�'”>“却”;however>conversely>instead>only(“>”means“antecedent to”);2.Basic definitions of adversative adverbial conjunctions are almost the same,but the semantic backgrounds of adversative adverbial conjunctions in Chinese are more complicated and flexible.The preferred order of the numbers of semantic comparison categories that these words occupy should be:“�'是”>“却”>“反而”/“反�'”;however>conversely/instead>only;3.Adversative adverbial conjunctions mainly have three pragmatic functions,namely,information focus function,designating presupposition function and transformation function.The present study is helpful to further study adversative adverbial conjunctions. It has implications both in language learning and translation. It also provides a comparative way to analyze linguistic features in Chinese and English.