A Dependency Grammar-Based Analysis On Syntactic Complexity Of English-Chinese Translation

Based on three syntactic-annotated treebanks and within the theoretical framework of Dependency Grammar,this study investigates the syntactic complexity of English-Chinese translation by measures of dependency distance,dependency direction and dependency relations as variables of deep syntactic structure.There are main findings in the following two aspects.For one thing,in terms of the syntactic features of English and Chinese language:1)As most dependency relations present positive in direction,that is,governor as semantic core precedes its dependent,language is thus proved to be organised in a cognitively cost-saving way.2)Most modifier dependency relations are in positive direction in English,which means the modifier constituents are usually postpositive to semantic cores.As this syntactic sequence goes in accordance with the sequence of cognitive processing of meaning,the postpositive elements increase little difficulty in understanding the main meaning.This feature enables English sentences to be extended and embedded to a deeper hierarchical structure.However,Chinese modifier dependency relations tend to form in negative direction,which makes its prepositional modifiers limited in number and short in dependency distance so as to relieve the cognitive difficulty.This feature determines Chinese limited capacity of involving additional constituents within a construction,otherwise the language goes obscure.For another,in terms of the influence of translation on syntactic features of Chinese:1)Translation process increases the mean dependency distance(MDD)of translational Chinese by reorganising dependency direction or word order,increasing the syntactic complexity and responsible for some obscurity.2)The MDD of negative dependency directions is longer than that of positive ones in native Chinese,which means additional information of the sentence are mostly located in front of the semantic core.This is also true to the circumbendibus of Chinese.However,influenced by the utterance pattern of English,translational Chinese by statistics tends to start with governors,that is,the semantic core and the most important information,reflecting translators' ignoring conventional feature of Chinese by and large.3)The proportion of positive dependency direction increases in translational Chinese.This feature manifests translators'cognitively cost-saving choice of syntactic structure and supports the hypothesis of simplification from the perspective of Dependency Grammar.4)Translation brings about an increase in the use of prepositive modifiers in translational Chinese.As governors that are usually fulfilled by nouns and verbs normally embrace prepositive modifiers in Chinese language,the overuse of this norm about modifiers in Chinese translation supports the hypothesis of normalization.5)Translation process makes the syntactic structure of translational Chinese more explicit in denoting subject and object,which shows the feature of explicitation.The theoretical value of this study lies in the introduction of quantitative indicators of deep syntactic features to corpus-based translation studies,which can provide new perspectives and research methods,help to deepen the understanding of the nature of translation,and enrich the theories and methods of corpus-based translation studies.