A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Adverbial Conjunctions In Public Speech

Adverbs,both in Chinese and English,have always been a complex but widely studied class of words.English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions,as a special type of words,can not only serve as adverbs,but also play the role of connecting context before or after clauses.Domestic and foreign scholars' researches on adverbs and conjunctions are remarkable,but it is rare to find studies on adverbial conjunctions,especially the comparative study on adverbial conjunctions in English and Chinese speech oral texts.On the basis of the linguistic facts,this thesis collects 20 texts from the TED speech and the Yi Xi speech in the past six years.Then the text is transcribed,and with the help of corpus,we make a screening and analysis respectively,from the syntactic,semantic,pragmatic perspectives to compare adverbial conjunctions in these speech texts.Firstly,the research analyzes the adverbial conjunctions appearing in the speech from two aspects,namely the syntactic position and semantic distribution.Secondly,it analyzes the pragmatic of the English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions in the discourse.Through the comparative analysis,we find that: 1.In the syntactic distribution: 1)English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions can appear at the beginning or in the sentence.The two languages appear at different positions in the beginning,but both languages show higher occurrence frequency in the sssp structure(representing adverbial conjunctions).2)The positions of Chinese adverbial conjunctions are more restrictive and they do not appear at the end of the sentence,while English adverbial conjunctions can be placed at the end of the sentence,usually preceded by commas,indicating a pause in the flow of language.3)English adverbial conjunctions do not appear in the sp structure,while Chinese is relatively dominant.2.On the semantic level,both English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions can express the following seven semantic relations,but they occur in different frequencies: temporal,explanative,additive,adversative,resultative,conditional and assertive relations.In English speeches,the order of the frequency of adverbial conjunctions is: temporal > additive > adversative > explanative = assertive > resultative > conditional(“>” means “higher frequency”).While in Chinese speeches,the order of frequency is: additive > adversative > assertive > temporal> explanative > resultative > conditional.(“>” means “higher frequency”).3.In terms of pragmatic functions,adverbial conjunctions in English and Chinese have three main pragmatic functions: focus marking,subjectivisation and emphatic function.The purpose of this study is to help English and Chinese learners understand and apply adverbial conjunctions more deeply in their speeches,to help readers understand the similarities and differences between English and Chinese speeches,and to provide readers with a new perspective and useful help in analyzing and learning speech expressions.