A Cognitive-based Semantic Analysis Of Serial Verb Constructions In Song Of Poetry And Its Translation

Serial Verb Construction (SVC) typically contains two or more verbs in a sequence without any overt connective morpheme. Chinese has a rich inventory of SVC, yet studies into modern Chinese SVC, though fruitful, mostly focus on its internal mechanism at the syntactical level and have scant regard to meaning; even fewer are researches devoted to ancient Chinese. For a model viable on semantic level for grammatical analysis, this paper seeks help from cognitive grammar founded by Langacker who claims that grammar is in nature symbolic. Aiming at ancient SVC, this paper delves into the underlying semantic features by combining the form and meaning of SVC which could also extend to the evaluation system of SVC translation.On the basis of cognitive grammar, the thesis first analyzes the semantic features of SVC with data collected from the book Song of Poetry. With reference to the classification of Aikenvald (2006), this paper classifies SVCs into two major classes: asymmetrical and symmetrical SVC. For asymmetrical SVC, the composite structure has only one process to be profiled, and the content of the other process recedes into reinforcement. Symmetrical SVCs are further divided into two subclasses considering whether the verb sequence follows the chronological order. Meanwhile their event conflation is examined. When the first event temporally precedes the second one, the SVCs extend three semantic relations:sequence of action, purpose and cause and effect, all of which involve events that are conflated in a comparatively loose way. When the chronological order of verbs is not zoomed, manner SVC emerges with a relatively tight event conflation.For extension, the semantic features are subsequently applied to SVC translation evaluation, so as to see to which degree the original meaning is covered in the translated text. For analysis, this thesis leans on two translation versions from James Legge (2011) and Xu Yuanchong (2009). The translations are construed on the basis of the four parameters, namely, specificity, focusing, prominence and perspective. Major findings are as follows. First, the types of SVCs show different focuses in translation with the meaning of the minor verb being the focus of asymmetrical SVC and the meaning from the two or more processes and their internal semantic relations the focus of symmetrical SVCs. In terms of the two translation versions, Legge’s translation with a relatively less flexibility in linguistic approaches on the whole is closer to the meaning of the source text. Xu’s versions have diversified expressions, but semantically speaking his translation diverge more from the source text. As for the four parameters at play in construing a scene, the most influential one and the most frequently-used in SVC translation is focusing. The importance declines from prominence and perspective, with no apparent influence found in specificity.