A Contrastive Study On Chinese And English Adverbs Of Exclusiveness Category

Each language employs different forms to express the exclusiveness category. Adverbs of the exclusiveness category play an irreplaceable role in delivering the concept. Previous studies mainly give some descriptions about the semantic and syntactic features of an individual or several exclusiveness category adverbs(ECA for short). The present thesis contrastively analyzes the functional features of Chinese and English ECAs from three aspects: semantic function, syntactic distribution and subjective quantity. The major findings are:(1) In terms of the direction of the semantic orientation, English ECAs, except alone, can orient both forwards and backwards while Chinese ECAs can only orient backwards. It lies in that the position of English ECAs is more flexible than Chinese ones in a sentence. As for the amount of the semantic orientation, both Chinese and English ECAs can orient one or more constituents. When an ECA orients more constituents, the pragmatic ambiguity occurs; however, when the constituent oriented by an English ECA is a single item, there will be no ambiguity. The difference of pragmatic presupposition is the deep reason of the ambiguity.(2) Syntactically, Chinese ECAs are relatively fixed in distribution and have strict selections to the NP(noun phrase) and VP(verb phrase). By comparison, English ECAs are quite flexible and can distribute not only on the initial position, but also on the medial position or even at the end of a sentence.(3) Pragmatically, the biggest difference is that the stylistic feature of Chinese ECAs is much stronger than English ones. In Chinese, guang has the strongest colloquial colour, and jin, jinjin and wei have the most apparent written language color; in English, either in colloquial or written language environment, the most frequently used ECAs are always just and only. Besides, Chinese ECAs can express small, moderate and large subjective quantity; however, English ECAs cannot express the large subjective quantity. Moreover, Chinese ECAs are much more capable of denoting subjectivity.(4) The awareness of the differences between Chinese and English ECAs will be conveniently applied to their translation, such as the translation shifts(structure, class, and unit) that arise in expressing notions of exclusiveness.Hopefully, this study is of both theoretical and practical significance. In theory, this contrastive study has shed some light on the respective features of Chinese and English ECAs. In practice, this research may be of some help to the teaching and learning of ECAs as well as to the translation(machine translation included) between Chinese and English.