A Contrastive Study On The Explicitation And Implicitation Of English And Chinese Translocative Hand Motion Events

This thesis is a contrastive study on the explicitation and implicitation of English and Chinese translocative hand Motion events(THME)on the basis of parallel narrative corpus.The aim of study is to find out similarity and difference between English and Chinese THME expressions in terms of implicitation and explicitation.Our analysis finds that in terms of spontaneous Motion-one sub-type of Motion,bounded Path and direction Path-two sub-types of Path,Intensity of Force and Direction of Force-two sub-components of Manner,Agent-one sub-component of Cause,Animate Figure and Inanimate Figure-two sub-types of Figure,and initial Ground-one sub-type of Ground,English and Chinese have no significant explicitation and implicitation preference variance in THME expressions.Although English and Chinese show much explicitation and implicitation similarity in the expressions of above THME elements,they are divergent from each other in the following four aspects:caused Motion,route Path,Speed of Force,Instrument,and medial Ground.We find that Chinese is more likely to explicitate caused Motion and Instrument while English tends to explicitate route Path,speed of force and medial Ground.And as for Figure,although English and Chinese have similar explicitation and implicitation tendency in the expression of animate Figures and inanimate Figures,they display different features if we take the Motion type into consideration.English prefers to explicitate animate Figures and implicitated inanimate Figures in caused THMEs while Chinese inclines to implicitate animate Figures and implicitate inanimate Figures in caused THMEs.Then we analyze the reasons behind findings we find from three aspects:1)cognitive mechanism,language system and the subjectivity of translators.For one side,the methods people employ to express the mental image of a complete concept in their minds are restricted to the languages they use.Besides,due to the different scopes of perception,people will pay attention to different portions of the whole concept.For another side,the lexicalization patterns and grammatical characteristics of different languages are variant.English has more Manner verbs than Chinese though both of them are satellite-framed languages.In addition,English is with the characteristics of stativeness while Chinese is with the characteristics of dynami.Moreover,translator is always an active factor during the process of translation which may subjectively influence on the translated texts since there is randomness when the translators select words and syntactic structures and the translation style and strategy of the translators may also influence the target texts.