A Contrastive Study Between Chinese Temporal And Spatial Preposition "ZAI" And Its English Translation

Prepositions are important and complex parts of speech in many languages.Ma Shi Wen Tong started the study of prepositions in modern Chinese,which has a history of more than 100 years.Prepositions in Chinese are mainly used to elicit the time,place,direction,object,basis,cause,and goal related to the action.Among them,the spatiotemporal prepositions that lead time and space arguments are representative.Previous study has mainly researched spatial prepositions or temporal prepositions respectively from the perspective of structural description and cognition,but not much research on the temporal and spatial categories of prepositions simultaneously from the perspective of translation.On the basis of the corpus-based method and combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis,this thesis takes the temporal and spatial prepositions“ZAI”as its research objects.The sentences containing temporal and spatial prepositions“ZAI”are selected from the“Parallel Corpus of Lu Xun's Stories”which includes Lu Xun's two novels,Wandering and Call to Arms,and their English versions translated by famous Chinese translators Yang Xianyi and Dai Naidie?Gladys Yang?.Based on the semantic classification,the temporal prepositions“ZAI”and the spatial prepositions“ZAI”are studied separately,trying to answer the following two questions:?1?How are the temporal preposition“ZAI”and its translations,and spatial preposition“ZAI”and its translations distributed in the text??2?What are the similarities and differences between the temporal preposition“ZAI”and its translations,and the spatial preposition“ZAI”and its translations in terms of semantic functions and syntactic features?Several major findings are listed as follows:Firstly,the results of the distribution of“ZAI₁”show that there are semantic meanings of origin,locality and endpoint distributed in“ZAI₁”,and the meaning of locality and endpoint are majorly presented;and“ZAI₁”are mainly distributed in the following two patterns,pattern A:NP+PP+VP and pattern B:NP+VP+PP,locality and endpoint can appear in two patterns,but the former tends to be presented as pattern A and the latter are mostly presented as pattern B;furthermore,“ZAI₁”distributed in four PCs?Prepositional Construction?,ZAI+N.+Localizer,ZAI+Pron.,ZAI+Localizer,and ZAI+N.,and“ZAI₁”are mostly presented in PC of ZAI+N.+Localizer.Besides,the results of the distribution of the corresponding English translation show that the translation are more diverse in form,and there are also significant differences of corresponding English translations used in quantity;the distribution of different English versions are also connected with the distribution of the semantic meaning,the prepositional constructions and the sentence patterns of the corresponding Chinese prepositions.The results of the distribution of“ZAI₂”show that there are two semantic meanings of“ZAI₂”,point and period,and“ZAI₂”are presented mainly with the semantic meaning of point;“ZAI₂”are primarily distributed in the following five PCs:ZAI₂+Nt/NPt,ZAI₂+?Nt/NPt?+Localizer,ZAI₂+?Nt/NPt?+Marker,ZAI₂+Non-Nt/Non-NPt+Localizer and ZAI₂+Non-Nt/Non-NPt+Marker,and the semantic meaning of the PC is the result of the joint restriction of the preposition and the PO?Prepositional Object?,and the Marker or Localizer actually determines the meaning of PO,the meanings and forms of POs of“ZAI₂”have a significant impact on the semantic expressions of“ZAI₂”PCs.Besides,the results of the distribution of the English versions of“ZAI₂”show that the English versions are diverse in form and present great differences in quantity;the distribution is also connected with the PCs and their semantic meanings of“ZAI₂”.Secondly,the results of the comparison between“ZAI₁”and its corresponding English translation indicate that,in terms of semantic functions,the English versions translated with English prepositions contain more specific and detailed meanings;there are three conditions in which the PCs are mostly translated without English prepositions;besides,there is a common point that both spatial prepositions of English and Chinese can express abstract meaning through metaphorical connections.And in terms of syntactic features,PP tends to precede VP in Chinese,while PP is more inclined to follow VP in English;and the quantitative distributions of various syntactic functions of Chinese PCs are presented as adverbial?320?>complement?311?>attribute?37?>subject?17?,while English presented as complement?302?>adverbial?213?>attribute?48?>predicative?6?>subject?5?.;in addition,the syntactic function of Chinese PCs with“ZAI₁”relates more closely to the positional relation between the preposition and the verb in the sentence.The results of the comparison between“ZAI₂”and its corresponding English translation show that,in terms of semantic functions,both Chinese and English temporal PCs can express the semantic meaning of point and period,but in Chinese the meaning should be determined by“ZAI₂”and its PO,while in English the meaning mainly determined by prepositions;in Chinese,the meanings and forms of POs of“ZAI₂”have a significant impact on the semantic expressions of“ZAI₂”PCs,since the Localizers and Markers in PO of“ZAI₂”can indicate the meaning of period and point,respectively.While in English,there are not any markers like that,since English has prepositions of point and prepositions of period.And in terms of syntactic features,the PCs with“ZAI₂”are mainly used as subject,adverbial,attribute in the sentences,while the corresponding English translations can mainly be used as adverbial;specifically,there are sentence-initial adverbial,sentence-middle adverbial and sentence-end adverbial both in Chinese and English;and Chinese PCs are more likely to be used as sentence-middle adverbial,while the distribution of the three adverbial functions in English is relatively even;the quantitative distributions of various syntactic functions of Chinese PCs with“ZAI₁”are presented as adverbial?70?>attribute?6?>subject?2?,while in English presented as sentence-end adverbial?15?>sentence-initial adverbial?11?>sentence-middle adverbial?10?;and among the adverbial usage in Chinese,the Chinese PCs of point are mostly translated by non-prepositions,while the Chinese PCs of period are mainly translated as prepositions which function as adverbial.The results of the thesis show that,in theory,selecting the temporal and spatial prepositions as research objects can give new understanding to the semantic role and syntactic function of prepositions in sentences and even in discourses,and will also find the distinguishing characteristics of prepositions,which can help to further classify prepositions.In practice,under the background of“Chinese fever”,a comparative study of the temporal and spatial prepositions in English and Chinese can help foreign students to solve the problem of acquisition errors of Chinese preposition“ZAI”,and this study also provides useful reference for the acquisition of English temporal and spatial prepositions and their English translations of“ZAI”.