A Contrastive Study Of “V+Time-span Phrase” In English And Chinese

“V + time-span phrase” is frequently used in both English and Chinese. In this pattern, time-span phrase measures the event denoted by a verb. But it is very complex because it has great varieties in form and meaning. Moreover, in translation practice, the expressive forms and syntactic positions of Chinese time-span phrase are inconsistent with that in English. Especially for Chinese, which is featured by parataxis and loose structure, the semantic interpretations of time-span phrase may various due to different semantic features, situation types of the verb, or even the different positional relations. These differences directly influence the acceptability, as well as the semantic interpretations of the sentence. That brings trouble to translation practice and foreign language teaching.The semantic interpretations and syntactic positions of time-span phrase are always been hot issues in the linguistic research. Chinese scholars mainly focus on syntactic and semantic interpretations. They discuss the time-span phrase should be considered as temporal object or temporal complement, and how the different positional relations influence the semantic meanings. While foreign scholars regard time-span phrase as a measure adverbial of an event or an activity, and interpret the meanings from the semantic and cognitive perspective. With the fruitful findings of previous studies both at home and abroad, much has been known about the time-span phrase. However, most of them are based on monolingual corpus, lacking of contrastive analysis between English and Chinese, leaving many issues on bilingual transformation of time-span phrase unaddressed. Although there are a few studies based on linguistic typology, they merely focus on the cognitive universals of the expressions in different languages, without pointing out the differences and their causes.This study adopts event semantics and contrastive analysis. By retrieving a large amount of data from parallel corpora, the author analyses different meanings of “V +time-span phrase” and compares the expressions in English and Chinese, then summarizes some conversion rules and possible translation strategies. This study mainly discusses the following three non-equivalence phenomena when translate the“V + time-span phrase” structure between English and Chinese: firstly, when express the durative and completive meanings of “V + time-span phrase” pattern, there aredifferent forms applied in English and Chinese. Different prepositions will be used in English while the syntactic order of time-span phrase and verb will be changed in Chinese; secondly, when an noun object appears in “V + time-span phrase” pattern,different positions of the object will lead to different semantic interpretations of this pattern; thirdly, when time-span phrase co-occurs with another nominal quantifiers in English, they are usually put after the verb, connected by a preposition or an adjective.However, that is unacceptable in Chinese. Two quantifiers can’t co-occur after a verb,they should be put at both sides of the verb or before the verb.By summarizing these three phenomena, it’s found that the encoding ways of the“V + time-span phrase” structure in English and Chinese vary a lot. Because of a lack of morphological changes in Chinese, it is often the syntactic means like changing the word orders that used to deal with semantic conflicts. While in English it often applies lexical and morphological means. I hope the conclusions and implications will be of possible significance for foreign language teaching and E-C translation practice.