On Hendiadys In Shakespeare's Plays And Its Chinese Translation From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

As a remarkable stylistic marker, hendiadys in Shakespeare's plays usually elevates the discourse and blurs its logical line and it is most congenial to Shakespeare's purposes in those plays that explore the problematic depths of thought and feeling. Hendiadys derives its effect from its deviation from normal patterns of coordination. It is a figure of speech in which two substantives (nouns, adjectives and verbs) connected by a conjunction and to express a semantic modifier-head complex or other logical dependent relation. The basic pattern of this figure is "substantive 1+ and+substantive 2". Besides, nouns are more commonly used in hendiadys than adjectives and verbs. The key to understanding this figure is to bear in mind that two units combine together to express a more complex notion. Furthermore, hendiadys is a scheme in form, but a trope in essence. It is not only a rhetorical device, but also a cognitive method.Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) has a strong explanatory power and has been applied into the studies of rhetoric and translation in recent years. In order to decode hendiadys's semantic complexity, this thesis applies CBT to analyze its meaning construction, aiming to catch a better understanding of this figure's relation between form and meaning, and better appreciation of Shakespeare's language. Besides, this thesis regards the cognitive process in translation as a process of interaction among four spaces:a conceptual blending process of the two input spaces (STS (source text space) and TRS (translator space)) in the blended space (BTS (blend text space)) with the mapping from the generic space (GS). When it comes to the translation of hendiadys, we take Shakespeare's plays and their cultural schemata as STS, Chinese expressions and its cultural schemata as TRS, the chosen Chinese versions (Zhu Shenghao, Liang Shiqiu, Sun Dayu and Bian Zhilin) as BTS. Taking characteristics of Shakespeare's hendiadys, cognitive blending process and ways of projection into consideration, we attempt to put forward two translation strategies: semi-correspondence projection strategy (source text space projection and translator space projection) and non-correspondence projection strategy.The application of CBT in rhetorical studies and translation studies has provided a brand-new perspective for the related fields and will facilitate the development and perfection of these researches.