A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Pre-temporal Adverbial Conjunctions-from The Perspective Of Functional Grammar

This paper makes a comparative study of Chinese and English Pre-temporal Adverbial Conjunctions(Pre-temporal ACs)under the guidance of Halliday’s Functional Linguistic Theory.The Pre-temporal ACs mainly include Yuanben(原本),Yuanlai(原来),Benlai(本来)in Chinese and originally,formerly,previously in English.Although some scholars have realized the significance of this type of word and analyzed from different perspectives,still,there aren’t so many researches on the comparative study from the perspective of Functional Grammar.The thesis first introduces the purposes and methods of the research. And then, it deals with the theoretical foundations of the study and relevant researches on ACs at home and abroad. After that, the syntactic functions, semantic functions, interpersonal and textual functions of Pre-temporal ACs are systematically analyzed. Noticeably,the thesis makes a specific definition on Pre-temporal ACs under Yuan Surong’s(2008) classification of ACs. Eventually, the major findings and practical implications are described. Meanwhile, the limitations of present study are pointed out and some suggestions for further study are made by the author.The data in this study are selected respectively from two corpora, the Corpus of Chinese Linguistic(CCL) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA). Base on the selected data, the quantitative study of syntactic positions and the qualitative analyses of the semantic functions, interpersonal and textual functions are conducted in the thesis. The interpretation of each analysis is provided by real text corpus. The study finds that Chinese and English Pre-temporal ACs have different syntactic and semantic functions, and the similarities and differences on textual and interpersonal functions are also found through investigation. The major findings are as follows: 1. On Syntactic functions, Chinese Pre-temporal ACs are fixed in their positions, either in initial positions or medial positions. In spoken discourse, these words have the top frequency of appearing in initial positions. And the English ones are more flexible in their positions. Appearing in final positions, this type of word functions as an emphasis. 2. On semantic functions, they both carry an adversative meaning in sentences, which can either indicate negation or partial negation, at the same time, they have the function of strengthening mood to check the previous information. The semantic patterns are more varied for Chinese Pre-temporal ACs.3. On interpersonal and textual functions, Chinese and English Pre-temporal ACs have different features on subjectivity and objectivity. Moreover, there exist some rules in the grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. And the similarities and differences can be found in the thematic patterns of Chinese and English Pre-temporal ACs.