A Corpus-based Comparative Study On Iconicity Of Order In Adverbial Clauses And Their Main Clauses Between The Yangs’ And Hawkes’ English Versions Of Hong Lou Meng

Studies on English translations of HLM have always been a research focus for scholars both at home and abroad.The trend of interdisciplinary research also emerged gradually.However,studies based on cognitive linguistics are still limited.Iconicity,as one of the research hotspots in cognitive linguistics,is most evident in the syntactic structure.Adverbial clauses,as a common language phenomenon,are widely concerned by linguistics because of their unique syntax,flexible distribution and high frequency of use.However,few studies adopt corpus-based research method to examine order’s iconicity between adverbial clauses and their main clauses,and combine them with different translations of HLM to investigate translators’ subjectivity based on iconicity.By means of Chinese-English parallel corpus of HLM constructed by professor Zequan Liu,this study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to investigate main similarities and differences of five types of adverbial clauses and their main clauses,selected from 30 chapters of Hawkes’ and the Yangs’ English versions of HLM respectively,in following iconicity.The potential motivations of these similarities and differences are also explored.It is found that there are two main similarities of two translators in following iconicity.Firstly,Hawkes and the Yangs both mainly adopt iconic sentence order(ST)— iconic sentence order(TT)and iconic sentence order(ST)— salient sentence order(TT),which can be abbreviated as IS-IS and IS-SS.Among these two,IS-IS accounts for the largest proportion;secondly,Hawkes and the Yangs both follow iconicity to a large degree in the translation of adverbial clauses,that is,they both have great tendency of adopting iconic sentence order.What’s more,it is also found that there are two main differences of two translators in following iconicity.Firstly,the Yangs have a higher degree of following iconicity than Hawkes;secondly,Hawkes has a higher degree of adopting salient sentence order than the Yangs.Two motivations of main similarities are as follows.Firstly,humans’ general cognition towards iconicity is consistent;secondly,two translators are both influenced by iconicity in the source text.The differences between two translators originate from four aspects of different thinking modes between Chinese and English,syntactic differences between Chinese and English,different translation purposes,different cultural background of different translators.There are three implications of this thesis,which are stated as follows.Firstly,this thesis provides a new interdisciplinary theoretical perspective for studies of order between adverbial clauses and their main clauses and HLM translation.Secondly,it enriches iconicity from syntactic level.Thirdly,it also has enlightening significance for translation practice,that is,during the process of translation,students should not only adopt iconic sentence order,but also should adopt salient sentence order consciously by breaking up conventional thinking out of various motivations.It is conducive to represent relationship among charactors,shape images of different charactors and express speaking purposes,which will make the translation more vivid.