A Contrastive Study On The Futuristic Expressions In English And Chinese

"Future" is an indispensable part of the time concept that exists in different languages with different expressions.Even in the same language,there are various forms.This paper presents a contrastive study of the futuristic expressions in English and Chinese,emphasizing the futuristic expressions in Chinese and a case study of the grammaticalization process of futuristic expressions in the two languages.Firstly,with the help of BFSU Paraconc,this paper extracts 2,175 synchronic discourses expressing futurity from the YIYAN English-Chinese parallel corpus.After the one-to-one comparative analysis,the discourse statistics are conducted,and the futuristic expressions in Chinese are categorized.On this basis,the grammaticalization processes of English will and Chinese hui are analyzed,and the similarities and differences between the two are described and compared to explain the synchronic discrepancies between English and Chinese futuristic expressions,thus further unveiling the fact that Chinese has richer methods of expressing futurity than English.Through the classification of the synchronic discourses,it is found that the frequency of the Chinese modal verb hui is the highest when the English future marker will is used as the reference in the database.The futurity of Chinese is expressed mainly by lexical devices,but it also includes grammatical and pragmatic devices.Moreover,these three devices can be further divided into different expressions of futurity.Besides,the high contextual dependence on Chinese also implies that the context largely constrains the use of grammatical devices.Contextual information overrides the default temporal information.Therefore,the methods of expressing futurity in Chinese are more diverse than those in English.Through the diachronic comparison,this paper further explains why will and hui function as futuristic modal verbs and can be widely used.In their grammaticalization process,both will and hui undergo the interaction of reanalysis,metonymy,analogy and metaphor.The semantics of will and hui gradually weaken,and the modality types evolve.Eventually,they evolve from substantive verbs to modal verbs with futurity.The degree of grammaticalization of will is higher than that of hui.The process of grammaticalization of will and hui is usually accompanied by subjectification,in which the animacy of the subject as well as subjective indicators play critical roles in the use of will and hui as modal markers or in expressing pure futurity.This paper will enrich the study of language temporality and simultaneously hopes to provide some inspiration for the teaching of tense in foreign languages as well as in Chinese.