A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Interjections Based On Hongloumeng And Its Two English Versions

Interjections are a kind of special discourse constituent, which are generally regarded as a typical case of emotional language. With their distinguishing open characteristics on phonetics, semantics and syntax, while interjections share some similar features with onomatopoeia and modal particles, they are strictly different from these two parts of speech. This presents some difficulties for linguists in defining certain aspects of interjections, of which their ownership of part of speech is the most prominent one. Coupled with their vague meaning and the fact that their implications may change when they are put in different contexts and spoken with different intonations, interjections pose some difficulties in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Nevertheless, so far linguists have not paid enough attention to it.A review of the previous study of interjections indicates that scholars at home and abroad lay their emphasis generally on the following several aspects:the basic questions of the contrastive study of Chinese and English interjections; the similarities and differences between Chinese and English interjections from phonetic, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic perspective; research on translations between any two languages or dialects, more Specifically in the research area of structural, the phonetic, semantic, syntactic and indicative features, the English-Chinese or Chinese-English translations, the different usages between two languages and sexes, the differences caused by the speakers’different identities, the cross-cultural pragmatic study, and the dialects researches. It is generally believed that the previous study is mainly from the rhetoric perspective. However, the deficiencies of all the former studies are obvious, namely the severe scarcity, inadequacy of studies both in quantity and research depth. From all the interjections-related articles collected so far, we can see that most of these research results are published in the form of academic articles and their publication time is relatively old. Furthermore, the number of related papers on interjections can be counted on one’s fingers. Generally speaking, these studies have four deficiencies:(1) the lack of a scientific method of comparative study, some authors drew a conclusion only through the analysis of certain chapters in a novel or the dialogues from some web pages.(2) In most of the previous comparative studies of interjections, almost no one compare their similarities and differences under the same context.(3) Few of these studies give explanations for their research results, which leads to, to some degree, the loss of their reliability.(4) Some influential studies are introduced from the western academic circles, so their research conclusions are inconvincible in view of their neglect of Chinese languages.In consideration of the deficiencies of the previous studies, taking one of Chinese famous novel Hongloumeng and its two English versions as corpus, this thesis attempts to make a systematic study on interjections and their similarities and differences between Chinese and English. Here are the questions to be addressed in this thesis:(1) what are the phonetic, semantic and syntactic features both Chinese and English interjections share, and what are the differences between them?(2) What’s the use condition between the two opposite sexes?(3) What are the differences caused by the different identities of the speakers in the novel?(4) When the interjections in the oringial work are translated by two translators who are brought up and educated under two different cultural backgrounds, will the strategies they choose be different? If so, what will be the equivalence relationship between Chinese and English interjections under the same context?In a manual way, the writer made an exhaustive collection of all the interjections in Hongloumeng and its two English versions. Based on the comparison and analysis of these interjections, some conclusions are drawn as follows:(1) Phonologically, there is a huge difference for all the interjections in different countries and regions, but because of the same generation mechanism of interjections, it is quite common to see examples of one-to-one correspondence between Chinese and English interjections. In addition, English uses intonation to distinguish different connotations, being a tonal language as it is, Chinese also uses intonation to indicate different emotions. Semantically, there is almost no semantic vacancy between Chinese and English in term of emotions expression, and these two languages share some common features. Structurally, interjections both in Chinese and English are distributed at the beginning, middle and end of sentence. And the beginning position is the most common, while the middle and end position are much less common.(2) With women’s refined and sensitive emotions, interjections are used more by women than men both in kind and amount.(3) hi the novel, because the characters with a higher social position are given more right to speak, so their interjections are much more than those with a lower social position.(4) Because of the cultural differences between East and West world, the number of interjections in the West world is much bigger than in the East. By comparing the translation of interjections in the two English versions, the equivalence relation of interjections in Hawkes’version is bigger, while that in Yang’s version the difference is comparatively smaller. So translation styles of the two versions are quite different, while Yang’s version is more faith to the original novel, but inevitable with a smooth writing, Hawkes’version pays more attention to the connotation, so it is easier to understand for those foreigners who got little background of this novel.Of course, due to the limitations of the author’s knowledge and the source of corpus, some conclusions are only exploratory and this field of study still has much room for improvement. However, it is a significant attempt to make a meaningful exploration from the pragmatic perspective, and it makes a contribution to the study of interjections in this great novel Hongloumeng and its two English versions. Taking this study as a starting point, we have found that many new issues are worth exploring in this field. Although both Yang’s and Hawkes’ versions are widely accepted and praised by the academic field, some of their translations of interjections are still needed to be improved. At the same time, this thesis tries to provide a theoretical support for the second language learning and teaching of interjections. Furthermore, there are large number questions to be studied, such as the comparison of interjections between two or more languages, the effective and efficient way to teach and learn interjections. These questions need to be answered in future study.