A Comparative Study Of Supplementary Connection Components In English And Chinese

As a common semantic category both in Chinese and in English,“Addictive”shows many similarities and differences between English and Chinese.Based on the semantic category of addition,we endeavor to make a comparative study of the additive connective elements in English and Chinese from syntactic-semantic-pragmatic dimension.There are both systematic and case studies in this thesis.In the systematic research,we comprehensively discuss the similarities and differences between English and Chinese Addictive Connective Components from the syntax,semantics and pragmatics,and systematically classify them into six categories:“Particularity Additive(?????)”?“Primary and Secondary Additive(?????)”?“Supplementary Additive(?????)”?“Parallel Additive(?????)”?“Elaborative Additive(?????)”?“Digressive Additive(?????)”.In case studies,we choose two most equivalent pairs of cases from the E-C parallel corpus,namely they are“I mean”and“woshishuo(???)”;“by the way”and“duile(??)”and conduct a comparative study between them both at synchronic and diachronic mensions.Through systematic comprehensive research and detailed case study,we hope to provide practical guidance for second language acquisition and compilation of English-Chinese dictionaries,and even contribute to the exploration of common laws and different characteristics of human language.This thesis is divided into seven parts:The first part is the introduction,which includes the purpose and significance of the topic,the review on previous research fruits,corpus sources and research methods.At the same time,we define relevant terms in the study,and explain the scope of related research.The second part is the main body,which is divided into the following five chapters:Chapter one: the syntactic position of the Addictive Connective Components in English and Chinese.We compare the syntactic expressing forms of English and Chinese Addictive Connective Components,and discuss their syntactic features in terms of the syntactic position and the collocation or concurrence with conjunctions and modal particles.Chapter two:The semantic features of English and Chinese Addictive Connective Components.Based on some classical Chinese and English dictionaries,this thesis analyzes the semantic features of addictive connective components in English and Chinese.In the meantime,we divide them into six categories:“Particularity Additive(?????)”?“Primary and Secondary additive(?????)”?“Supplementary Additive(?????)”?“Parallel Additive(?????)”?“Elaborative Additive(?????)”?“Digressive Additive(?????)”,and we make a semantic comparison between them.Chapter Three: the pragmatic functions of English and Chinese Addictive Connective Compmonent.Through the analysis of the corpus,we discuss the similarities and differences between Chinese and English Addictive Connective Components about the pragmatic functions,mainly including their supplementary function,emphasis function,prompt function and discourse marker function.Chapter Four:a comparative study of“I mean”and“woshishuo(???)”.In view of the lack of comparative study between Chinese“woshishuo(???)”and English“I mean”in previous studies,we make a detailed study of“I mean”and“woshishuo(???)”in terms of their semantic functions and grammaticalization process supported by the theories of contrastive linguistics,discourse markers,grammaticalization and subjectivization.Chapter Five:the discourse function and grammaticalization of“by the way”and“duile(??)”.We find that Chinese“duile(??)”and English“by the way”show great equivalence according to the translation corpus with very similar functions and meanings the phenomenon of which has received very little notice in the academic circle.Through detailed comparative case study we endeavor to explore the main similarities and subtle differences between them in terms of their discourse functions,and analyze the grammaticalization process of“duile(??)”and“by the way”from a diachronic perspective.The last chapter is the conclusion,which summarizes the main content of this thesis and points out the problems to be further studied and solved.