A Corpus-Based Study Of Delexical Verbs In The Chinese Translations Of Shakespeare’s Plays

Since Mona Baker put forward the idea of investigating translation throughcorpora in1993, corpus translation studies have been developing remarkably. Amongall the studies, one is the study of delexical verbs through the corpus-based approach.Delexical verbs are verbs with reduced semantic meanings but strengthenedgrammatical functions. With the assistance of the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus ofShakespeare s Plays (ECPCSP), this thesis selects “zuo”(in Chinese “做” and “作”)as an example to explore delexical verbs in the Chinese versions of Shakespeare s23plays translated by Zhu Shenghao, Liang Shiqiu and Fang Ping separately.In the current research, the usages of delexicalized “zuo” in the Chinesetranslations of Shakespeare s plays are divided into three categories:1) the one usedbefore a title or an identity;2) the one used after a verb;3) the one used before adeverbal noun or deverbal noun phrase. The present thesis focuses primarily on thedelexical “zuo” used before deverbal nouns or deverbal noun phrases. On the onehand, the English text is studied to find whether the use of delexical “zuo” in Chinesetranslations is influenced by the source text. On the other hand, the Chinese textwhere delexical “zuo” structures occur is investigated to find whether there existcertain linguistic features in delexical structures.A Corpus-based analysis shows that14.1%,14.5%,8.3%of the delexicalstructures in Zhu s, Liang s and Fang s translations are translated from Englishdelexical structures. In contrast,48.5%,36.3%,46.9%of the delexical structures inZhu s, Liang s and Fang s translations are translated from English notional verbs. Thisreveals that the use of delexical “zuo” in the Chinese versions of Shakespeare s playsis not strikingly influenced by delexical structures in the English source text.In terms of the linguistic features of the Chinese text where delexical “zuo”structures are used,“zuo” tends to collocate with various constituents and the flexibleuse of modifiers contributes to the great collocation capacity, the percentage of which accounts for85.9%in Zhu Shenghao s translation,81.5%in Liang Shiqiu s and66.7%in Fang Ping s. In addition, coming after delexical “zuo”, verbs are nominalized.It can be concluded that the use of delexical “zuo” structures in the Chineseversions of Shakespeare s plays is not due to delexical constructions in thecorresponding English source text. Instead, delexical structures in the translatedChinese text might come from various constituents such as notional verbs, nouns,adjectives, prepositional phrases etc. An analysis of the Chinese text with delexical“zuo” structures shows that delexical structures are more flexible in collocation andvarious modifiers can be applied. With nominalization, a delexical structures is toindicate a whole process rather than a simple action.