A Study On The Frame Filling And Configuring Of Temporality And Spatiality In Song Ci-poetry And Its English Versions

Frame semantics is a study about how to understand semantic contents of lexical items in sentences according to the conceptual structure,which provides help for people to acknowledge and describing the semantic structure.The study of semantic structure can be derived from words to phrases,to sentences,even to texts,which is very important for us to understand the discourse.Current researches of frame semantics mainly focus on examining its application with a single text or a single language,rather than the contrastive study on multi-versions of Song-Ci poetry.Furthermore,previous studies show no study on the temporality and spatiality of Song-Ci poetry with multiple English versions from the perspective of frame semantics.This thesis is an attempt to such a study.Based on frame semantics,this thesis selects randomly four Song poems as the source texts from four types of Song Ci,namely,nostalgia,hometown sentiment,lyric and scenery poetry,one poem for each type(Waterbag(“Su Mu Zhe” in Chinese),Riverside Town A Dreaming of My Deceased Wife on the Night of the 20 th Day of the 1st Month(“Jiang Cheng Zi · Yi Mao Zheng Yue Er Shi Ri Ye Ji Meng” in Chinese),Tune: “Telling of Innermost Feelings”(“Su Zhong Qing” in Chinese)and The Lantern Festival Night-to the tune of Green Jade Table(“Qing Yu An · Yuan Xi” in Chinese)),and selects three kinds of versions of each poem as the target texts,including Y.Xu's(2011),Zhuo's(2008)and anonymous versions from website,making a contrastive study on the explicit and implicit frame filling and configuring in source texts and target texts from the micro-(words),meso-(phrase)and macro-levels(sentences).The frame filling in this thesis refers to the filling of frame components and the “slots”(e.g.the singular-plural form,tense,case,etc.)in the activation of the original frames,in which the correspondences of the original components are termed as explicit fillers,and the non-correspondences(the adding or missing of the frame component)are termed as implicit fillers.Configuring refers to allocating,reorganizing,or filtering the corresponding temporal-spatial components of space-time frames in target texts in order to maintain the consistency of the frame components in original space-time frames.Research findings are presented as below.First of all,for semantic contents of source texts and target texts have been added or improved,the number of explicit fillers reveals an increasing change in the number from microscopic to the macroscopic analysis,whereas the number of implicit fillers shows a decreasing trend changes from microscopic to the macroscopic level.Secondly,based on different perspectives of writers and translators,frame elements in source texts and target texts are not completely equal although the core elements of explicit space-time frames are successfully activated.Very often,in the activation of space-time frames,there usually exist some widening or narrowing of semantic contents,sub-frames changes and pre or backward of positions of space-time frame components.Thirdly,in microscopic analysis,elements in target texts such as plural,tense and person are expressed with explicit grammatical marker characterization,while they are not noted in source texts.At the same time,sentences structures of target texts are different from that of source texts,which often leads an increase,decrease or omission in semantic contents of space-time frames.Fourthly,in mesoscopic analysis,the phrases of space and time in source texts are mostly derived into clauses in target texts,which act as adverbials in the whole sentences.Last but not least,in macroscopic analysis,the sentence structure is simple,and the meaning is obscure in source texts,while in target texts,the sentence structure is complex(existing large amounts of complex sentences or complex sentences),and the meaning is obvious.There are many similarities and differences of spatial-temporal frame filling and configuring between source texts and target texts,which are closely related to the cognitive basis and the pragmatic habit of English and Chinese.Furthermore,different perspectives of translators will also have an impact on the frame filling and configuring.This thesis,studying spatial-temporal frames of Song-Ci poems and their versions from the perspective of frame semantics,could have certain practical significance on exploring and analyzing Song-Ci poetry and its translations.