A Comparative Study Of Emphative Adverbial Conjunctions In Chinese And English

This study is aimed at conducting a comparative study of adverbial conjunctions of Chinese“尤其是”,“特别是”and English especially as well as particularly.In this study,the syntactic features,semantic relations and the specific applications of this category are compared.It is conducted to explore the similarities and differences of the application of Chinese“尤其是”,“特别是”and English especially as well as particularly.The corpus adopted in the study is about 19 classics and their corresponding authoritative translations of four different countries: namely China, America, Britain,and Canada. As far as the syntactic characteristics are concerned, the thesis employs a cognitive and quantitative study to investigate the syntactic structures and distributions of these adverbial conjunctions in the study. And with the help of a number of tables and bar charts, the intrinsic relations among these emphative adverbial conjunctions have been well-displayed and understood. Furthermore, the qualitative analyses of their semantic features have been carried with a number of semantic mappings and detailed interpretations have also been given. In addition, this thesis also pays close attention to the application of Chinese and English emphative adverbial conjunctions in the selected classics. It mostly analyzes the specific applications of these cohesive ways in the selected corpus and summarizes the similarities and differences.It has been found that Chinese and English emphative adverbial conjunctions share some similarities and differences in terms of the syntactic features,semantic relations as well as specific applications in the classics.The principal contributions can be summarized as follows:1.The syntactic positions of Chinese emphative adverbial conjunctions are usually fixed in the initial or medial position,while English is more flexible as regards to syntactic structures.In addition,the syntactic positions of some English adverbial conjunctions can even be placed at the end of thesentence.But owing to the different cultural backgrounds,writing styles and the interpretation of the works of the authors,the translation of“尤其是”and especially as well as“特别是”and particularly are not found to be in perfect accord.2.The semantic mappings mainly display two kinds of semantic relations,namely inclusion relations and non-inclusion relations.Moreover,the basic definitions of emphative adverbial conjunctions are almost the same,but the semantic backgrounds of Chinese emphative adverbial conjunctions are more complex and diversified.3.The specific application of Chinese and English adverbial conjunctions in discourses embodied in five aspects,namely:reference,ellipsis,substitution,conjunction and lexical cohesion.And the function of cohesion in text is aimed to making and smoothing the preceding part and the following part of the whole context,achieving a sense of coherence.It is hoped that the present study is helpful to further the research on emphative adverbial conjunctions. Additionally, this study explores a new way to do the comparison with this novel topic. It tries to provide a practical approach for researchers to make the cross-linguistic contrast, and hopes to be useful for language teaching, learning and translation, etc.