A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions In Works Of Canadian Modern Female Writers And The Chinese Versions

No matter in modern Chinese or modern English, the study of adverbs has always received much concern. English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions refer in particular to adverbs and adverbial phrases functioning as connectives in complex sentences and discourses. They play a very important role in the adverb system. The study of adverbs at home and abroad is relatively extensive. However, English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions, especially the comparative study of them is still in the beginning stage, thus the further exploration should be conducted.The corpus of this paper is on the basis of the nine short novels by Alice Munro,who is the Canadian winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, and five novels by Margaret Atwood, known as “Queen of Canadian Literature”, and their Chinese versions with the theoretical bases of cohesive theory by Halliday and Hasan,functional linguistics theory by Halliday as well as the discourse analysis theory by Harris. By adopting the method of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, we have a classification of English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions in their works and have a comparative analysis of them from perspectives of syntactic features, semantic relations and textual cohesive functions. All the analyses are based on the real text corpus.Through the comparative analysis, we can find that English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions have some similarities and differences from aspects of syntactic features, semantic relations and textual cohesive functions. The major findings can be described as follows: 1. Both English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions can be in the initial, medial, end positions as well as standing alone from aspect of syntactic position. The structure “ □ +P”(“ □ ” represents “adverbial conjunctions”, “P” represents “predicate”) can only occur in Chinese versions and“S+P+□+PP”(“S” represents “subject”, “PP” represents “prepositional phrase”) only appears in English. 2. Both English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions can express the temporal, explanative, additive, adversative, resultative, conditional and assertiverelations. The preferred occurrence frequencies of English adverbial conjunctions tend to be as follows: Additive > Temporal > Assertive > Explanative > Adversative >Conditional > Resultative(“>” means “antecedent to”). While in Chinese, the preferred occurrence frequencies can be demonstrated as follows: Assertive >Additive > Explanative > Temporal > Adversative > Resultative > Conditional. 3.Both English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions achieve the textual cohesion mainly by grammatical cohesion(reference, substitution, ellipsis) and lexical cohesion(reiteration, collocation).The purpose and significance of the present study lie in offering some help to the in-depth study of English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions and making English and Chinese learners have a much deeper understanding of adverbs. Moreover, it aims to provide a new perspective for the readers to appreciate the literary works.