A Comparative Study Of Adverbial Conjunctions In Obama's State Of The Union Addresses And The Chinese Translations

Adverbial conjunctions are the special words which not only have the modifying function of adverbs but also have the linking function of conjunctions,so adverbial conjunctions can be regarded as the transition zone standing between adverbs and conjunctions.The researches on adverbs and conjunctions both at home and abroad are very extensive,but few scholars have studied the adverbial conjunctions,and the comparative studies on adverbial conjunctions in English and Chinese texts are fewer.The languages of Obama's speeches are standard,expressive and convincing,so the studies on his speeches can not only help language learners to broaden their horizons,but also to improve their language competence.It is obvious that the values of studying Obama's speeches are high.This thesis collects eight Obama's State of the Union Addresses and their Chinese translations from 2009 to 2016 as a corpus.The adverbial conjunctions are comparatively analyzed from the perspectives of syntax,semantics,pragmatics and cohesion in both English and Chinese speech texts.Then based on quantitative and qualitative analyses on syntactic and semantic distributions of the adverbial conjunctions,this thesis mainly finds that: 1.From the perspective of syntactic features,1)both English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions have initial,middle,end positions and zero form.Each of the former three positions can be further categorized into two or more subcategories,but some small parts of those subcategories are limited to either Chinese or English.2)the position of adverbs in the sentence is determined by the habit of a language.Chinese tends to put adverbial conjunctions in the middle of a clause,thus the middle position is the most frequently used structure among the three categories.In contrast,adverbs especially adverbial conjunctions share a low frequency of use in the texts of English,and the usage distributions of these nine subcategories are relatively average.2.From the perspective of semantic relations,1)adverbial conjunctions in both English and Chinese can be divided into eight semantic categories and twenty subcategories in terms of their functions in connecting the text.But some subcategories do not exist in English,others do not exist in both English and Chinese.2)In English,the speaker is more inclined to use additive adverbial conjunctions to connect two different things and to add or to emphasize new information,and the temporal adverbial conjunctions are also frequently used to clarify the orders of different things,so as to make the audience understand the chronological order of the incident better.In contrast,few conditional and resultative adverbial conjunctions are used in Chinese to avoid showing a favorable denotation or a kind of impatience.The purposes of this thesis are to deepen the readers' appreciation and understanding about the arrangement of Obama's speeches,especially to provide a useful help for the learners to deeply understand the syntactic features,semantic relations,pragmatic functions and textual cohesive functions of adverbial conjunctions in Obama's speeches.