A Study Of Adverbs Of Favorable Denotation In Chinese And English

This thesis is aimed at exploring the syntactic, semantic features and pragmaticfunctions of the Chinese adverbs (“幸亏”“幸而”“好在”) and the Englishadverbs (fortunately, luckily, happily) of favorable denotation from the angle ofHalliday’s Functional Grammar. Semantically, these adverbs all express that it isfavorable that something showed its presence or took place or was done because if ithad not, the situation would be unpleasant or difficult. As potential equivalents intranslation, they will show similar features. However, restricted by the rules ofdifferent languages, they will present different properties. The thesis attempts toanalyze and explain these similarities, differences and some regular patterns exploredon the basis of the data collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American Englishand the Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU by applying Halliday’sFunctional Grammar.The thesis has seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the aim andsignificance of the study, the research methodology and the overview of the thesis.The second chapter briefly reviews some researches on these adverbs at home andabroad, and discusses the related theories. The main body includes the following fourchapters. The third chapter describes and examines the syntactic structures anddistributions of these adverbs. On the basis of the description and statistical analysisof the collected data, the reasons underlying their syntactic features are explainedfrom the functional aspects: interpersonal function and textual function. The fourthchapter discusses the semantic configuration of the adverbs, the logical relationshipbetween the elements concerned within Halliday’s logico-semantic system oflanguages, and their co-occurrence with some typical words. The fifth chapter probesthe pragmatic functions of the adverbs in discourse. The sixth chapter is a case studyof the adverbs in ten classical novels, which have their respective translated version.The main aim is to test and verify previous researching results and hypotheses. The last chapter summarizes the main findings, and discusses the limitations of the study.Moreover, it puts forward some suggestions for further research in the future.