The Semantic Property Of The Way Construction And Its Realization In Translation

The way construction is a special construction in English with a fixed structure[SUBJ_i[V[Poss_i way]OBL]]expressing a typical spatial motion event.Jackendoff takes the way construction as a kind of“constructional idiom,”marked by the noun way.Goldberg particularly studies the way construction in“Constructions:A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure”.According to her,the way construction is a way to express the motion event with the meaning of path creating and difficulty overcoming.The types of verbs that can be fit into the construction are various but not easy to classify.And the way construction expresses complex event semantics.Additionally,there is difficulty in translating the way construction from English to Chinese in that the latter does not have the equivalent construction.Previous studies mainly focus on the constraints on the types of verbs allowed in the construction and the process of grammaticalization,with less concern with its translation and the difference between English and Chinese in encoding complex event semantics.Thereby,with the foundation of event semantics,this thesis investigates the semantic property of the way construction,then,probes into its translation.Put another way,this thesis explores how Chinese realizes the complex event semantics entailed by the way construction,the difference between English and Chinese in the encoding of the complex event semantics and the reasons caused the difference.The major findings of the study are as follows.Firstly,the way construction expresses a typical spatial motion event which is composed of two single events,the framing event(the moving event)and the co-event.The co-event bears the support relation of Cause,the support relation of Manner and the support relation of Concomitance to the framing event.Compared with the framing event,the co-event is more substantive than the framing event for its vivid content.Secondly,there are four interpretations of the way construction,namely,the means interpretation,the manner interpretation,the incidental activity interpretation and the goal interpretation.Each has its own characteristics.After observing the translation examples,we find that most of the translations of the expressions with the way construction omit the semantic meaning entailed by the co-event which causes the problem of semantic underspecification.The E-C translation will be more difficult when adverb is inserted after way in the way construction,for adverb itself is complex whose semantic orientation is difficult to determine.Therefore,a thorough understanding of the semantic property is indeed necessary.Thirdly,English and Chinese have different way in the encoding of the same conceptual semantics.The way construction can express two events with several conceptual units while Chinese has to realize the rich semantic meaning entailed by the two events in an analytic way for it doesn?t have the equivalent structure.Fourthly,as for the C-E translation,when Chinese uses an analytic way expressing the moving event and the co-event,the realization of the way construction is more concise and conforms to the economic principle of language.The study shows that the event semantics is really explanatory and illuminating in investigating the semantic property of the way construction.The logical expressions can effectively present the two events,the relationship between these two events and the ways of the encoding of each conceptual unit,thus,lay a solid foundation for both E-C and C-E translations.