A Comparative Study Of Coordination Structure In Chinese And English

Coordination is a common and significant linguistic phenomenon,and coordinating construction is one of the most significant syntactic and semantic constructions.The linguists at home and abroad researched many aspects of coordinating construction,such as the categorical definition of coordination,the principles of sequencing the coordinate,the coordinators.Recently some scholars have been studying coordinating construction from the perspective of grammaticalization,cognitive function and typology.They made many achievements but there are still some points to improve,such as the unification of the terminology,the balance between description and explanation,between theoretical pursuit and practical application,between the study within a single language and the comparative study between languages,between study of special subjects and systematic study.This paper will try to make a systematic comparison of the coordinating construction in Chinese and English,in an attempt to find out their similarities and differences,and will explore the strategies for acquisition,study and translation of the coordinating construction.In order to study the coordinating construction in a thorough and comprehensive way,we need to categorize the construction from different criteria.From the number of the coordinates,it can be subcategorized into binary coordination and multiple coordination;from the syntactic and semantic nature of the coordinates,it can be subcategorized into homogeneous coordination and heterogeneous coordination;from the semantic closeness,it can subcategorized into combinatory coordination and segregatory coordination;from the conjoining manner,it can be subcategorized into overt coordination and covert coordination;from the logical relations of the coordinators,it can be subcategorized into conjunction coordination and disjunction coordination;from the sequencing order,it can be subcategorized into fixed-order coordination and flexible-order coordination.The overt coordination will have he(?)/and and huo(?)/or as its typical markers.In Chinese he(?)is not as grammaticalized as and in English,and its semantic persistence causes the entanglement of its part of speech between coordinator and preposition,sometimes even in one sentence.Under certain circumstance,the conjunction coordinator he(?)/and can express the disjunction conception,and vice versa.The main function of coordinator is linking,whereas its minor function is splitting when there is semantic hierarchy in the multiple coordination.In translation,he(?)does not always correspond to and,and sometimes it corresponds to with as an accompaniment.Overt coordination has its marks and covert coordination has no marks.In theory,a coordinator can be inserted between the coordinates of covert coordination.Due to some syntactic government,however,some coordination construction must be overt and some covert.Judging by the frequency,Chinese coordination tend to be covert and English coordination tend to be overt,just as the commonly acknowledged opinion states that Chinese is parataxis language and English is hypotaxis language.The position of the coordinators in the coordinating construction is between the coordinates both in Chinese and in English.The Immediate Constituent Analysis is not suitable for the overt coordination construction.In prototypical coordination,the order of the coordinates is not fixed and changing the order of the coordinates will not change the meaning of the construction and will still be conventionally accepted.In reality,due to the restrictions of various factors,the order of the coordinating construction should be fixed.Prominence and least effort are the motivations for sequencing the coordinates.The common sequence modes like male-female sequence in terms of gender,old-young sequence in terms of age,high-low sequence in terms of social status,big-small sequence in terms of size,positive-negative sequence in terms of comment,starting-ending sequence in terms of distance,are all motivated by prominence.The sequence of the coordinates usually resembles the order of the time and space as it is called iconicity in cognitive linguistics,and the coordinates of high concept accessibility will be put before the one of low concept accessibility,and the least difficultly pronounced coordinates in terms of syllable,rhythm,pitch and tones will be put before.This is motivated by least effort principle.The Chinese coordinating construction and the English coordinating construction are generated in a similar way.Every coordinate is an input space and the characteristics of one coordinate can be mapped onto the other.Processed in generic space and generated in integrated space,the coordinating construction absorbs the characteristics from all the coordinates and sometimes new meaning will be produced as well.The relevance mechanism between the coordinates includes phonetic relevance,semantic relevance,grammatical relevance and logical relevance.Coordinating construction can be acquired and learned through multiple strategies,like synchronic strategy and diachronic stlrategy,the differentiation of prototypical coordination and peripheral coordination,comparative and contrastive strategies.In translation the following strategies can be employed,like free translation and literal translation,addition and deletion,transforming and substitution.