Representation Of Motion Events In English And Chinese

From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this thesis conducts a contrastive study of motion events representation in English and Chinese in the light of Talmy's motion event theory, and further explores the translation of motion events from Chinese to English. The manner and path conceptual components of motion events are the focus of this comparative analysis. The similarities and differences examined in this study can be summarized as follows:First of all, with regard to the manner representation of motion events in English and Chinese, both English and Chinese use manner-of-motion verbs and adverbials to represent the manner concept, and there are certain corresponding semantic manner verbs in the two languages. English has a larger repertoire and higher lexicalization degree than Chinese, and English is rich in numerous specific manner verbs that express elaborate and fine-grained manner information while Chinese usually uses general manner verbs and adopts analytical expressions adverbs for instance to express detailed manner information. Therefore, English can be categorized as a high-manner-salient language while Chinese a low-manner-salient language. Second, in terms of the path representation in English and Chinese analyzed from lexical, semantic and syntactic aspects, path verbs, path satellites as well as path prepositions are applied in English and Chinese to encode the path conceptual structure. There exist some correspondences on path verbs and path satellites between English and Chinese. Besides, compared to English, Chinese has a larger number of path verbs which are more frequently used in the representation of motion events. Just like English path satellites, Chinese path satellites can follow motion verbs to encode motion events. Some directional verbs in Chinese can occur alone as main verbs to encode motion events, and this strategy is widely applied in Chinese motion event rather flexibly. This point can justify, to some extent, that Chinese is a satellite-framed language having certain characteristics of a verb-framed language. Chinese path prepositions are combined with nouns of locality to encode motion events. Furthermore, English and Chinese differ in the representation of consecutive motion events. Specifically, English adopts the expression:Motion verb+Path1+Path2+Path3+...Pathn, while Chinese uses the pattern:[Motion verb+Path]1+[Motion verb+Path]2+[Motion verb+Path]3+...[Motion verb+Path]n. The exploration of the translation of the motion events from Chinese to English, taking Cries in the Drizzle by Yu Hua as a case study, is aimed at discovering some strategies that can be applied. Constructions of path-of-motion verbs can be literally translated into corresponding representation of path verb constructions in English. As regards the recoding of constructions of manner-of-motion verbs, these four methods can be applied:1) corresponding representation of manner verb constructions; 2) elaborate representation of manner verb constructions; 3) conversion into path verb constructions; 4) constructions of come+the present participle of manner verbs. By exploring the translation of motion events in Chinese and English, this thesis attempts to provide some guidance for translation practice.