A Contrastive Study Of Conjunctions In C/E Discourse And Its Application In Translation

Since the 1990s, many scholars have begun to bring the text linguistics into the field of translation studies, and these studies expand into the field of contexts and the communicative functions of language. For a long time there has been a lack of full and clear understanding on conjunctions, people tend to think that there are no other functions of conjunctions other than the connective function. This thesis attempts to apply the Register Analysis Theory proposed by M.A.K Halliday (1976) to explain the relationship between conjunctions and styles through contrastive and qualitative studies of conjunctions in both English and Chinese text/discourse. It is expected that the study will deepen the understanding of conjunctions, aid people to construct texts appropriately in translation practice.The framework of describing conjunctions in this thesis is based on the Cohesion Theory raised by Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Hu Zhuanglin's modification of conjunctions (1994) which is appropriate for people to analyze conjunctions in Chinese. A qualitative study of heavy linguistic corpora from four different styles in both English and Chinese is carried out with the aid of software Oxford Wordsmith Tools (version 4.0). Factors such as the frequency of conjunctions, the occurring position of conjunctions, and particular dominating logico-semantic relations of conjunctions are considered in analysis. Analysis based on linguistic corpora shows that conjunction is language specific and it is sensitive to styles, each style has its preferred conjunctions to serve its purpose.Then Register Analysis Theory is employed to explain the relationship between conjunctions and styles based on the outcome of linguistic corpora from four different styles: Legal Documents, Sci-Tech Discourse, News Reporting and Conversational styles. It is concluded that the use of conjunctions is based on some rules and regularities rather than the product of mere chance. The choice of conjunctions is seldom free, but is influenced by various semantic, pragmatic, stylistic, cognitive and textual variables.This thesis furthers the research results into the field of translation. The treatments of conjunctions in translation are expounded in four styles, especially in Legal Documents and Sci-tech Discourse. It is suggested that the translator should pay great attention to the expectation of the reader, the intentionality of the source text and the overall effect of the text, particularly to those most frequently used conjunctions, such as and, if. Careful treatments in translation practice will make the text natural and remove translationese.