A Contrastive Study Of Come/Go And Lai (来)/Qu (去)

Motion verbs come/go and lai(来))/qu(去)are words of high frequency in English and Chinese.While plenty of instructional studies have been made of come/go and lai(来)/qu(去)in English and Chinese respectively,only a few researches have been particularly done on the contrastive analysis between the two pairs.The previous studies claim that motion verbs have deictic meanings,and factors such as the relationship of people and time in context should be taken into consideration for an appropriate choice of these verbs in different situations.This thesis aims to analyze the pragmatic meanings of come/go and lai(来)/qu(去),trying to find out the similarities and differences between them and to explore what underlies them.As far as typical pragmatic meaning is concerned,the two pairs are quite similar in use.Come and lai(来)are used when motion is towards the location of the speaker at the time of utterance,while go and qu(去)indicate motion away from the location of the speaker at the time of utterance.Therefore,come and lai(来)are goal-oriented,while go and qu(去)are source-oriented.As for their non-typical pragmatic use,three aspects should be taken into serious consideration:the relation between the speaker and the figure,the relation between motion and the time of utterance or the reference,and the social relationship between the speaker and the addressee.The two pairs also share similarities in their non-typical pragmatic use.Both come and lai(来)may indicate motion towards the location of the addressee when the speaker puts himself/herself at that location,which is a polite deictic shift to the addressee's point of view.Both come and lai(来)reflect the speaker's positive sensibility while go and qu(去)indicate negative or neutral sensibility,with come and lai(来)referring to motion towards the speaker while go and qu(去)indicating motion away from the speaker.Differences also exist between these two pairs as well as similarities.When motion is towards the location of the addressee,come is much preferable to go in English while both lai(来)and qu(去)are common in use in Chinese.When motion is towards the location of the addressee at a past time,lai(来)must be used in Chinese if the addressee is there at the time of utterance while qu(去)must be used if the addressee is not there at the time of utterance.By contrast,come is used in English either when the addressee is there or when he is not there at the speaking time,while go is only used when the addressee is not there at the time of utterance. When both the speaker and the addressee serve as the figure,which is indicated by the phrases like with me/us/you in English and the phrases like he ni(和你),he nimen(和你们),gen wo(跟我),gen women(跟我们)in Chinese,come is much preferred to go for the figure's motion,while in the same context,qu(去)is used for the figure's motion.What's more,come is more frequently used to indicate the figure's movement towards a place where neither the speaker nor the addressee is located at the time of utterance,while qu(去)is often used in Chinese in the same case.The use of these two pairs of motion verbs in English and Chinese is very complicated,and the translation between come/go and lai(来)/qu(去)is by no means a simple matter of equating come with lai(来),and equating go with qu(去). So,contrastive studies between them are of great significance,not only for C-E/E-C translation and EFL teaching,but also for the study of language.