An Analysis Of English Expression Of Key Concepts In Neo-confucianism

Neo-Confucianism is the revival of Confucian philosophy emerging in late 11 th century in the Northern Song Dynasty by synthesizing Taoist cosmology and Buddhism around the core of Confucianism; it is the gist of Chinese philosophy. Li(理), Xin(心) and Xing(性) are three key concepts of Neo-Confucianism, they have different interpretations by Ch’eng-Chu school and Lu-Wang school. There are many studies of the three key concepts home and abroad, they have different English expressions by different researchers. However, most of these studies are from the perspectives of sociology, culturology and translation, linguistic studies, especially corpus-based studies are quite small in number.The expression used in this paper differs from translation in that translation stresses the correspondence from source language to the target language, whereas the correspondence of expression is arbitrarily designated, and sometimes imposed by the author. Corpus linguistics is a discipline that studies language phenomenon based on large collection of language facts. It is also an important methodology. It tries to study language features to represent language phenomenon by concordancing, sampling and analyzing of authentic data. Sinclair said that the meaning of word should be interpreted by its collocations, the interpretation of one word should be given within the co-text and context. Wolfgang Teubert developed Sinclair’s idea and proposed the idea of hermeneutic analysis of text. It is that the relationship between words and words is interchangeable, so is the relationship between text and text. There are two instruments of hermeneutic analysis, one is intertextuality, the other is paraphrase; these two instruments provide theoretical foundation for meaning interpretation.This thesis tries to analyze English expression of three key concepts of Neo-Confucianism from corpus linguistics perspective. The English Neo-Confucianism Corpus and Chinese Neo-Confucianism Corpus are constructed to do contrastive analysis. Main methodologies used are keyword analysis and phraseological analysis.The research findings are:Firstly, there are seven English expressions of the key concept Li, two English expressions of the key concept Xing and nine English expressions of the key concept Xin in the English Neo-Confucianism Corpus. Meanings of the key concepts are constructed by collocations and phraseological patterns. This process can be seen as a process of reconceptualization and meaning reinterpretation.Secondly, English expression has the characteristics of generalization tendency, which is in contrast to the specialization tendency of Chinese expression. In English text, keyword is a general word that can be used to refer to anything when combined with different words, in Chinese text, keyword is used specifically accompanying with a limited set of abstract words to form some fixed concepts.Thirdly, there are three strategies of English expression: adopted expression, adapted expression and mixed expression. Adopted expression is to adopt the word in the target-language domain to analogize and correspond to the concept in the source-language domain, adapted expression is to use a literal word or neologism to adapt to the source language as there is there no such a correspondence in the target-language domain, mixed expression is a mixture of adopted expression and adapted expression. Using any kind of strategy may result in meaning conflict.Fourthly, meaning conflict of English expression results from the heterogeneity of two cultures, any English expression is acceptable for its meaning can be manifested by the collocations and strong patterns in the text.English expression of Chinese philosophical key concept belongs to the study of China English. Describing and analyzing English expression of Chinese culture may have contributions to theories of International English and English as a lingua franca. Corpus-based analysis of English expression of Chinese philosophical key concept is innovative both from theoretical perspective and methodological perspective. Studying English expression of Chinese cultural English has theoretical contribution to the consolidation of status of China English in the family of World Englishes. It has practical contribution to introducing China English to English education and strengthening the bearing and expression capacity of Chinese culture in English.