A Contrastive Study Between Chinese Versions Of Evolution And Ethics From The Perspective Of Functional Stylistics

As one type of practical writings,scientific work serves a key part in the interaction between the East and the West.Evolution and Ethics,a classical work of practical writing,paved the way for Darwinian Evolution.It exerted a far-reaching influence on Chinese people and changed the course of Chinese history to some extent.The two Chinese versions of Evolution and Ethics greatly differ both in style and content.Tian Yan Lun drew much attention from scholars and a great amount of studies have been conducted by the aid of various translation theories or theories from other fields.Yet with so abundant researches,not a single one was settled down to the text style and its language function.Moreover,little concern has been attached to the other version Jin Hua Lun yu Lun Li Xue,let alone contrastive analysis between the two Chinese versions.Based on the conception of functional stylistics “styles come from language use”,this thesis manages to explore the meta-linguistic functions of the two versions respectively following functional linguistic theories,trying to analyze the extent their prominence and foregrounding of language forms preceded and how their styles were formed.The contrastive analysis is conducted at semantic-structural and lexico-grammatical levels.Structural level,the analysis starts from the cultural and situational context,then the generic structure,at last the comparison in information unit and cohesion.At lexico-grammatical level,language features of the two versions are analyzed to explore their realization and prominence of ideational and interpersonal meaning.The present study,supported by the functional stylistics,aims to find out how the two Chinese versions differ in language use and then lead to distinctive styles,and to explore the underneath causes.The present study is composed of six chapters.Chapter one states the research background,research questions,research significance and the structure of the thesis.Chapter two categorizes and analyzes the previous studies related to the research objects,and then some existing deficiencies are pointed out.Chapter three is theoretical basis.It introduces theories of functional stylistics that will back this thesis up.In addition,the analysis method is presented as well.Chapter four and Chapter five make up the main body,where the contrastive analysis are carried out respectively at semantic-structural and lexico-grammatical levels.Chapter six concludes the research,presenting major findings,pointing out limitations and offering suggestions for future study to be carried out.And the major findings show that the differences of two versions' style are manifested in more specific points at semantic structural and lexico-grammatical levels.Those differences come from different language use,which are determined by translators' purposes of doing translation.