A Corpus-based Study On The Positioning Of Finite Adverbial Clauses In C-E Translated Political Texts

As a tool of cross-cultural communication, translation can be regarded as a special type of language contact, and based on the theoretical assumption that a language may change through contact with another, the present study is designed to investigate the positioning of finite adverbial clauses (i.e. temporal clauses, conditional clauses, causal clauses and concessive clauses) in the translated English version of Chinese political speeches and statements. So far, foreign scholars have conducted numerous studies on the positioning of adverbial clauses in English and the possible factors determining their position in the sentence. On the other hand, Chinese scholars also have done some quantitative researches on Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of the usage of adverbial clauses. But previous studies have not adequately addressed the differences on the positioning of adverbial clauses between translated English and original English.By using the comparable and parallel corpora of political texts made by Professor Du Zhengming, the present study intends to make a corpus-based study on the positioning of finite adverbial clauses in political translated English texts. From the perspective of contrastive linguistics and language contact, the cross-dataset differences in the positioning of finite adverbial clauses between translated English text corpus (TETC) and original English text corpus (OETC) are identified by using the Regular Expressions as a tool of data collection. The major differences are: adverbial clauses are used more frequently in original English than in translated English. In overall frequency, the adverbial clauses in OETC incline to occur sentence-finally (53%), while most of the adverbial clauses in TETC precede the main clause (58.1%). To specify, in OETC, conditional clauses (70.2%) precede the main clause more often than concessive clause (65.2%), which are in turn more frequently pre-posed than temporal clauses (41.4%). And only 10.9% of causal clauses are initial adverbial clauses. Nevertheless, the situation in TETC is different from that in OETC, the initial adverbial clauses in TETC are (in descending frequency): concessive clauses (94.7%), conditional clauses (75.5%), temporal clauses (52%) and causal clauses (29.8%).On the basis of a thorough description of the differences, it can be proposed that the translated English (China English) as a special stylistic variety of English is an outcome of language contact, just to be seen with a raising of awareness of the legitimacy of this non-native variety of English. Since the specific positional pattern of adverbial clauses can be regarded as one of the features of translated English (China English), we believe it can help identify whether a given text is a C-E translated version or an original one as well as supply some reference for the C-E translation of political texts. On the other hand, it also can offer some reference for the future English education of Chinese EFL learners and the designing of English teaching materials.