A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Approximate Quantities With Two Exemplar Numbers In The Story Of The Stone

Ghinese and English approximate quantities with two exemplar numbers(hereafter AQTENs)have their universality and individuality.The present paper attempts to figure out the similarities and differences between these two kinds of AQTENs in forms and meanings by conducting a contrastive study.It adopts the methodology which combines a corpus with a questionnairea corpus with a questionnaire.In the parallel corpus of The Story of the Stone,every linguistic case of AQTENs is extracted and analyzed,classifying scales are considered and summarized,and the unique features of different types of AQTENs are concluded and elaborated.In the investigation,native speakers' real recognition of AQTENs is discussed so as to find out their interval length,real boundaries,and each value's degree of membership.During this process,similarities and differences between AQTENs of these two languages are analyzed and illustrated.This paper aims to answer three research questions listed below.1)What are the general distributions of Chinese and English AQTENs in The Story of the Stone?2)What are the similarities and differences in forms between Chinese and English AQTENs?3)What are the similarities and differences in meanings between Chinese and English AQTENs?The research results can be summarized as follows.Firstly,Chinese AQTENs can be grouped into four subordinate types under the scales of order and adjacency.In this way,these four types can be simply named as "forward&adjacent AQTENs","forward&nonadjacent AQTENs","reverse&adjacent AQTENs",as well as"reverse&nonadjacent AQTENs".After doing chi-square test of Chinese AQTENs'fourfold table,no significant difference is found among these four types of approximate quantities.In addition,English AQTENs are composed of two subordinate types,namely "forward&adjacent AQTENs" and "forward&nonadjacent AQTENs".Secondly,it further discusses the unique characteristics ofChinese and English AQTENs in forms,illustrates their patterns of formation with examples,and summarizes their similarities and differences in forms.Chinese AQTENs which has the unique reverse type is more flexible and diversified contrasted with English AQTENs which only has the forward type.English AQTENs must be connected by linking words but there can be no conjunction in Chinese.Besides,language economy principles both apply to them,but the scopes of pattern application are different.English AQTENs is influenced by unity,duality,base 5 and base 10,while Chinese AQTENs is only influenced by unity and base 10.Thirdly,Chinese and English native speakers' interpretations of AQTENs' meaning vary,and the interval length,real boundaries,as well as each value's degree of membership of these two kinds of AQTENs also differ from each other.Chinese AQTENs' interval length is slightly larger than English AQTENs,and it has an increasing tendency.However,the interval length of English AQTENs is contrastively smaller,and it has a decreasing tendency.Furthermore,their fuzziness both enlarges by adding digits.And the degree of membership of the two exemplar numbers "number m" and "number n"is almost equal in English,but the degree of membership of "number n" is higher than"number m" in Chinese.This paper conducts a contrastive study of Chinese and English AQTENs under the framework of contrastive linguistics.It follows a parallel corpus-based quantitative method combined with questionnaires to make out the specific similarities and differences between these two kinds of expressions.It may contribute to reveal the universality and individuality between Chinese and English,and might deepen people's understanding towards fuzzy quantities.Furthermore,the research results are likely to shed some light on translation practices and foreign language teaching of these two languages.