A Comparative Study Of English-chinese Syntactic Structures From The Perspective Of Motion Events Frames

This paper makes some comparative analyses of English and Chinese syntactic structures from the perspective of motion-event frames on account of Talmy's description and classification of motion-event frames.Talmy divides the world languages into two categories: verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages.The distinction provides a new perspective for linguistic relativity,narrative style and interlingual translation research.This paper completely analyzes the motion events of English and Chinese in terms of the complexity of both the source and target language.Both the two languages falls into the category of satellite framed language.Therefore,the focuses of my paper turn to the systematic comparative analysis of the two languages from the dimension of syntactic structure,vocabulary pattern and conceptual components.Among five event frames,motion event becomes the major referent points to explore the similarities and differences,simultaneously,types of path(open path,close path and fictive path),windows of attention are established as the major parameters in the description of all the goals of the research.The explorations of the similarities and differences are excavated with reference to the syntactic structures which originates froms six basic conceptual components in motion events.All these tentative research bring us to come to the conclusion that [manner+motion] verbs are not equal in value between the two languages.Furthermore,the satellite components in Chinese still have the characteristics of verbs,which lead to the discrepancies in satellite components between the two languages.Chinese has diversified expressions to deliver manner,which give rise to the differences in manner between the two languages.All these findings drives me to detect the motivations underlying the similarities and differences which will greatly facilitate to discover the strategies for mutual translation.At last,there are two practical significance in my paper,and they are second language teaching and translation Between English and Chinese.The significance of this paper is to solve and revise the comparative study of English and Chinese syntactic structure that predecessors have not stepped into.Thisthesis also presents my insightful construal of syntactic structures in the two languages.What's more,studying English and Chinese motion-event frames comparison can solve the existing difficulties that learners may encounter in the process of two languages conversion,particularly for the translation between English and Chinese.In many cases,some descriptions of situation are not in full correspondence between English and Chinese,this turn out to be the greatest impediments in translation.This study is committed to solve the relevant problems.The significance of the subject is to provide reference from the view of typology in English and Chinese translation for Chinese students,especially in the field of syntactic structure.The study makes some beneficial supplements on English and Chinese motion event structures.Since Talmy put forward the dichotomy in the theory of motion event frames in 1985,domestic and foreign scholars have also extended the theory.This paper is also aimed at enriching and discussing Talmy's motion-event frames theory.The findings can be applied to second language teaching,and resolve the difficulties in translation between the source and target languages.