Syntactic Distribution Of Patients In English And Chinese

This MA thesis is an attentive study on the syntactic distribution of patients in English and Chinese. In traditional grammar, a simple sentence is basically divided into three major parts, namely, a subject, a verb, and an object. With the verb as the core of the sentence, the subject and the object are opposite elements determining the verb. They are the two very basic elements in traditional grammar. Though not completely correspondent, they are labeled as the agent and the patient in the case grammar, which was first proposed by Fillmore. Different from the traditional grammar, the case grammar defines these two concepts on the semantic basis. Agent is defined as the entity performs an activity or brings about a change of state, and patient as the affected or effected. Some grammarians, such as Zhang Bojiang, think that the notion of subject and object is not universal, but semantic roles such as agent and patient are acknowledged as basic notions in syntactic relation. In terms of the Chinese language, there might be difficulty in determining the subject and the object of some complicated sentences. In this sense, taking the notion of agent and patient as the Tertium Comparationis is much more appropriate when comparing English and Chinese sentence elements.However, until now there is still no systematic and comprehensive Contrastive study on the syntactic distribution of patients. In terms of the Chinese language, Lu Shuxiang discussed the four major sentence types, twelve patterns in all, according to the different positions of different semantic roles in the structure. While in terms of the English language, studies on patients' distribution are not thoroughly done. Current studies on patient (usually appear together with agent) are mostly involved in the analysis of certain sentence patterns. Thus, there is still a lot more to be desired on this issue. Based on this recognition, the author conducts the Contrastive studies on patient between English and Chinese. First of all, with the verb acting as the sentence core, this thesis categorizes the syntactic distribution of patients in English and Chinese into three general types, namely, the pre-verbal patient, the post-verbal patient and the zero-verbal patient, which are subdivided into seven different patterns, namely A. Na+V+Np; B. Np+V+Na; C. Np+Na+V; D. Na+Np+V; E. Np+V; F. P+Nv; and G. Nv+of+P, illustrated by bilingual examples in view of the specific syntactic positions of the verb, the agent and the patient. The exemplification reveals that amongst these seven patterns, some are shared by English and Chinese, and some others are unique in English or Chinese. Moreover, the frequency of usage of those shared patterns between the two languages is of great difference. In order to find out the reasons behind these similarities and differences, this thesis analyses patients' distribution from its most typical pattern, i.e. Patten A, to its least typical one. The analysis mainly covers the constraints on the patient proper, on the verb and on other elements in the structure as well as the ones in terms of culture, psychology and pragmatics. Finally, the author applies the findings on the distribution and its constraints to the translation practice of these different patterns between English and Chinese apart from the prototypical pattern. Provided with bilingual examples quoted from well-known novels and essays, the thesis mainly concludes some techniques of the transformation of these patterns and the handling of patients in translation. Through the discussion of the syntactic distribution of patients and the translation techniques, this thesis aims to give some inspiration to its readers on the translation practice of this type.