A Study On Translation Of Instrument Denominal Verbs From Event Semantics

Denominal verbs refer to a phenomenon in which a noun can be used as a verb without any morphological change and perform the grammatical functions of verbs.Denominal verbs are widely used in English but relatively infrequent in Chinese.When doing translation,this linguistic difference is likely to cause difficulties in understanding and influences the quality of translation.As a linguistic phenomenon,the denominal verb has been widely studied at home and abroad under different theoretical frameworks,which involve lexical,pragmatic,cognitive,rhetorical,and other perspectives.How to express the meaning of a denominal verb complete is essential? When we translate some simple denominal verbs,many problems often occur,such as:Sentence A: The rioters torched the local library.Sentence B:?????????????(DECPC)In sentence A,the noun-meaning of“torch”means??,but sentence B translates“torch”as???,which omits the instrument of“burn”—“torch.”Compared with the original sentence,the translated text after this processing not only has a high degree of reduction,but also has strong reader acceptance.So,can we omit the translation of the instrument among all instrument denominal verbs'translation?Does this omission in translation cause a loss of semantic meanings?There are three purposes of this study.Firstly,to analyze the characteristics of instrument denominal verbs and figure out the reasons why people use it.Secondly,to explore the cognitive basis of instrument denominal verbs and summarize the translation characteristics of it.Finally,this thesis takes the conceptual semantics(Jackendoff,1987)as a theoretical basis.It focuses on the translation of instrument denominal verbs,tries to provide an explanatory framework for the meaning construction of instrument denominal verbs.Conceptual semantics involves the decomposition of semantic components.It believed that the syntactic structure is formed by the semantic structure and some projection rules.It focuses on the formal relationship between semantics and grammar.Moreover,the semantic structure is composed of six main conceptual structures,namely: Event,State,Object,Path,Place,Property,among which Event and State are the most basic.The process of combining the underlying conceptual structures with the semantic projection rules is the process of concept formation.Different conceptual structures can express the same syntactic structure.The findings of the thesis reveal that event semantics can describe the conceptual structure of instrument denominal verbs intuitively and scientifically.It is reasonable to present the deep semantic relationship contained in instrument denominal verbs,which provides a reasonable explanation for its translation.Practically,it may improve the scientific and accuracy of instrument denominal verbs' translation.