| Whenever we compare every Chinese book with its English translation version,we may find that the Chinese version is always thinner than the English one.Of all the documents in the six official languages in the United Nations,the Chinese version is always the thinnest one.This linguistic phenomenon is worth studying.Up till now,there have been few studies at home and abroad of this phenomenon,and there are not much literature concerning this subject,either.The only relevant literature and the only study I have found is the one by Lin Ruchang and Li Many who made a contrastive study on the pages taken up by materials of the same amount of information with languages both of English and Chinese.And the experiment results indicate that Chinese vocabularies are highly identifiable.Chinese has a big capacity of information storage,and the linear space Chinese takes up is smaller than English.However,this experiment has not been further studied with linguistic theories.Currently,there has been no literature on the comparative study on the linear space occupied by Chinese and English vocabularies.In all English written texts,blank space is a must between every two words.Hence,judging from external intuition,we may say that English must occupy more linear space than Chinese.In fact,this kind of judgment is rough,not explaining the essential cause of this language differences from the perspective of linguistic theoretical point of view.To begin with,this thesis attempts to conduct a quantitative research to measure the linear space occupied respectively both by Chinese and English,and to compare the proportion.Then we perform a deeper research to find out the causes for the linear space differences between Chinese and English,from the theoretical linguistics point of view.The hypothesis of this study is that there are two reasons for the differences of linear space occupied by Chinese and English.One reason is that they are of two different scripts,namely,English is alphabetic writing,and Chinese is of ideographic characters.The other reason is that they belong to different language types.English belongs to an inflectional language,and Chinese isolating language.There are two steps in this study.First,a quantitative study is conducted,and then an interpretative study of the different linear space between the two languages on the basis of contrastive linguistic theory.In the quantitative study,we select 2927 essential vocabularies for College Entrance Examination in the year of 2016,673 phrases,100 English proverbs,100 different kinds of sentences,and 40 texts of different genres.The font size we set is No.5 Song in Chinese,No.5 Times New Roman in English.The exhibition proportion of the page is 100%with single line spacing.In this thesis,the straightedge is used to measure and compare the linear space between Chinese and English vocabularies in the above 4 levels.And the results indicate that:for the vocabularies,there at least 56%of the English words whose linear space is longer than that of Chinese;for phrases,77%of the English phrases whose linear space is longer than that of Chinese;for the sentences and discourses,all of the linear space occupied by English is almost longer than that of Chinese,and in the sentences,the average ratio of linear space between Chinese and English is 1:2.26.In discourses it is 1:2.37.We measure all the blank space between every two English words in discourses,getting the result that in general,the percentage of all the linear space taken up by the blank space in a discourse is 14.43%,besides those taken up by words.The second step is that we employ contrastive linguistic theories to analyze the difference in linear space between the two languages.This thesis compares two languages from the following three aspects based on language types:(1)Chinese is more of parataxis and English is more of hypotaxis;(2)Chinese syntax is flexible and English syntax is rigid;(3)Chinese is the language of topic-prominent,and English is subj ect-prominent.The major findings of the theoretical research are:First,parataxis language can express and interpret meanings according to the objective cognition,and hypotaxis language can express and interpret meanings not only from the objective cognition but also pays attention to the logic of language regulations,which results in more vocabularies used in English when expressing the same meaning as in Chinese.Second,English belongs to the rigid language,that is to say,English sentences have strict subject-predicate structure,with distinct primary and secondary parts,and the linguistic hierarchy is clear.Besides the 5 basic sentence patterns and expanded sentences,in English concord has to be kept with each component in person,number,tense,and meanings,namely,grammatical concord,notional concord and principle of proximity.While Chinese is a flexible language,and the syntactic structure is flexible,and the expression is also very flexible.This leads to the second reason for the use of more words in English than Chinese when expressing the same meaning.Third,Chinese is a topic-prominent language,and it emphasizes the topic in the sentence,not caring much about the structure of a sentence.But in English in most cases,a sentence must have a subject.If the sentence itself has no clear subject,it will find an alternative instead.This is the third reason for English should use more vocabularies than Chinese when expressing the same meaning.The conclusions obtained in this study verifies our hypothesis.The theoretical and practical significance:It extends the content and scope of Chinese-English contrastive study,inspiring more academic attention on the special Chinese phenomenon,and also to in-depth study;What’s more,it will be beneficial for the teaching of second language acquisition,Chinese-English translation and for international students to learn Chinese well.The deficiency of this research is that due to the limit of my ability and time,there might be some errors in the measuring of the data.The theory and examples also need to be further supplemented.The subsequent studies will continue to explore and supplement the causes for the linear spatial differences in Chinese and English from a linguistic point of view.For example,if we use corpus to measure discourses with over 10000 words,to carry out the multi-dimensional exhaustive comparison,the conclusion will be more accurate and more convincing. |
