A Corpus-based Study Of The Use Of SHI Construction In The Chinese Translations Of Shakespeare’s Plays

SHI construction is a typical Chinese causative construction with a long history. Asan important Chinese grammatical phenomenon, SHI construction has been a hotissue within the academic field. By now, studies on SHI construction converge mainlyon two aspects:1) the study of typology, formulation condition, semantic roles andsyntactical structures from pure grammatical perspective; and2) comparative studiesbetween Chinese and English in terms of the semantic, morphological and functionaldifferences of causative construction. Albeit the previous studies present extensivecoverage, they were based primarily on original texts and largely restricted to purequalitative analyses; attempts in the use of SHI construction in translated texts are rareand the supportive examples are rather limited and usually fall to personal preference.This thesis complements the previous studies by focusing on the use of SHIconstruction in translated texts under the guidance of corpus methodology. Bycontextualizing a linguistic phenomenon in translation practice, the thesis carries out aqualitative research with objective guarantee of considerable number of examples asquantitative basis.Assisted by the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Shakespeare s Plays (ECPCSP)and the Corpus of Chinese Original Plays (CCOP), the thesis conducts a quantitativeand qualitative study in three Chinese translations of Shakespeare s plays by LiangShiqiu, Zhu Shenghao and Fang Ping respectively with an aim to investigate thepatterns and regularities in the use of SHI construction in translations ofShakespeare s plays. Through a separate comparison between translated texts andoriginal plays as well as comparative analyses between the three translations, thethesis manages to discover some intriguing features: the SHI construction has beenused quite frequently in the translated texts than in the original texts, and unanimouslycorresponds to six sentence structures in the source text in all three translations; yeteach translation differs from each other in the frequent use of SHI construction andthe proportional relevance to each source sentence structure. Regarding theseidentified similarities and difference, the thesis gives a tentative analysis of themotivations for the use of the construction.