A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese And English Equivalents From The Perspective Of Co-selection Theory

Since the understanding and comprehension of language processing have been strengthened and improved, the traditional opinion that word as the unit of meaning is challenged. Instead, Neo-Firthian linguistics puts forward the co-selection theory which focuses on the extended units of meaning. Sinclair(1996, 2004) noted that phrase primarily carries the meaning. “Native speakers choose discourse which is combined by phrases rather than words to express their thoughts”(Wei 2002a: 69). The phrase, sentence and discourse are formed by the co-occurrence of words. Which collocation is chosen and how the discourse is constructed depend upon communicator’s attitude and communicative goal.Based on the instrumentalism and humanism of language, one objective of language teaching is that learners can properly use language to transfer information, and express their emotion. In the process of learning English as the foreign language, learners need L1 concept mediation which to some extent is helpful to build L2 concept. While L2 concept may be partially equivalent with L1 concept, the differences will cause output errors. So learners should contrast the mother tongue and its translation equivalents in terms of the relation among word, grammar and meaning to find out the similarities and differences among L1 concept and the concept of its translation equivalents.Based on English corpus FLOB and Chinese corpus LCMC,this thesis respectively retrieves English synonyms ACKNOWLEDGE group and Chinese synonyms cheng2ren4(承认)group,and then contrasts among them.After analyzing five categories of extended units of meaning,intralingual comparisons among English/Chinese synonyms and interlingual comparisons between English and Chinese synonyms are performed.There are three major findings:(1)two or more English words may correspond to one Chinese equivalent,but the differences in semantic prosody,grammatical pattern and collocational behavior cause partial or irreplaceable substitution of synonyms.(2)Semantic prosody is the key element considered in translation.It can filter the candidate phrases and keep consistent affective meaning with the original text so that communication and emotion are recognized.(3)Semantic intersection always exists between Chinese and English synonyms,while the degrees of correspondence are different.The degree of correspondence decides which word is better to express the emotion and content of communication.After analyzing these five categories of extended units of meaning, this paper discusses the implications for language learning and translation. Firstly, contrastive phraseology can help teachers and learners recognize the similarities and differences between synonyms. Secondly, the recognition of differences reinforces the understanding of words’ pragmatic meaning and helps learners correctly use them. Lastly, L1 concept and L2 concept are of multiple correspondent relations. So the analyses of features of extended units of meaning improve the quality and accurateness of translation.By intralingual and interlingual comparisons between English and Chinese synonyms, this article finds the similarities and differences between English and Chinese synonyms. This has important guiding significance for vocabulary teaching and learning, and it also provides references for the study of contrastive phraseology.