A Comparative Study Of German And Chinese Subjective Expressions From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

“Subjectivity” refers to a characteristic of language,that is,in the process of interpreting a paragraph,the speaker also expresses his position,attitude and feelings about the paragraph.“Subjectivization” refers to the corresponding structural form or the evolution process of language used to express this subjectivity.As a unique sentence construction in Chinese,the “ba” construction has strong subjectivity on the semantic and pragmatic level.Its basic form is: “NP1+ 把+NP2+VP”.There is no corresponding structure in German,but this doesn’t mean that the meaning of “ba” construction cannot be expressed.There are still few studies on bilingual comparison between the subjectivity of different languages,and the research on the contrast between Chinese and German is even rarer.This article takes this as a gap,starting from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,combined with relevant subjective theories,to deeply explore the subjectivity of “ba” construction and the formation mechanism behind them.Taking the first 80 chapters of Hongloumeng by Cao Xueqin and the German translation of Rainer Schwarz as corpus,this article searched and classified the “ba” constructions with different subjective meanings and analyzes the subjective expression methods used in the German translation and their effects.Cognitive grammar believes that language ability and cognitive ability are closely related.Langacker identified subjectivity and objectivity as a major feature of viewing arrangement.The “subjectivization” of language is essentially a semantic weakening phenomenon(attenuation).When the objectivity component in the understanding relationship is no longer the focus of attention on stage,the originally looming subjective component gains the attention.In the process of semantic falsification,“ba” gradually developed the extended meaning of “control” and “disposal” from the actual verb used to express “hand movement”.From a synchronic perspective,in order to express his/her own views and attitudes,the speaker adjusts his/her role in the understanding relationship,thus giving“ba” the function of expressing the speaker’s cognition,thus reflecting the subjectivity.In German,in order to retain and the different subjective meanings contained in the original sentence,the translator will mainly focus on the following aspects:1.At the lexical level:(1)Use suitable verbs(such as verbs with a strong causative meaning,modal verbs,idioms and collocations).(2)Use the structure with prepositions or conjunctions(for expressing location,reason,equivalence or substitution).(3)Use nouns with subjective implications(dative and diminutive).(4)Select or add appropriate Adverbs and particles.(5)Choose appropriate mode like subjunctive I and subjunctive II.2.At the sentence level:(1)Choose a suitable sentence type.(2)Changing the punctuation in order to emphasize the attitude.(3)Special structure like“我把你+NP”=“You+NP”.(4)Changing the word order.3.At the text level:The translation is mainly based on the central meaning of the context.The individual“ba”construction can sometimes be ignored,which can lead to the situation,that the subjective meaning of the“ba”construction is not fully retained and reflected in the German translation in detail.The innovation of this study is to use the “ba” construction as a specific vehicle to analyze subjectivity from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,which enriches the brief comparative studies between Chinese and German in the relevant area.With the help of the cognitive perspective,a deep analyzation of the language structure at the cognitive level has a certain intercultural significance.