| Light verb construction is one of the common structures in English,such as “have a look”,“take a listen”,and “make a decision”.In the process of English-Chinese translation,if it is directly translated into simple verbs like “look”,“listen”,“decide”,the verbal sense behind it is not reflected though they share the same meaning.In recent years,light verb construction has attracted the increasing attention of scholars,but little is known about its Chinese translations,and there is a lack of systematic theoretical support.This thesis analyzes the event semantics of English light verb construction namely “light verb + a/an + noun” structure by using a self-built bilingual corpus of news and magazines as source data,and aims to answer the following research questions:(1)Based on the present study,what are the major semantic features of English light verb constructions?(2)What are their corresponding structures in Chinese based on parallel corpus? Do they convey the original semantic features of English light verb constructions?(3)Through analysis,what are the justifications for Chinese translation from the perspective of event semantics? Based on previous study and observation of the monolingual corpus,this study finds that light verb constructions have three special semantic features due to the transformation of part of speech and the role of the indefinite article,they are telicity feature,quantification feature,and semantic bleaching feature,and these semantic features distinguish English light verb constructions from their simple verb counterparts.Therefore,it remains questionable to treat them directly as simple verbs in Chinese translation.As for this,this study takes the five most typical and commonly used light verbs as research objects,searches for light verb constructions and their corresponding Chinese translation forms(897 sentences in total)in the parallel corpus.It has been found that the proportions of semantic features of English light verb constructions in Chinese translation are: telicity(90.4%),quantification(91.4%)and semantic bleaching(74.4%),indicating that the semantics of these translations are generally consistent with the original text despite some slight differences.As for this,the study summarizes and classifies them into four typical translation forms:(1)Chinese light verb constructions,including “ make ” group and “ give ” group;(2)Chinese heavy verb constructions;(3)Morphological changes of single verbs,which can be subdivided into verb reduplication and “ V yixia ” structure;(4)Compounds with two syllables,including predicate-object compounds,verb-complement compounds and coordinate compounds.In conclusion,event semantics has strong explanatory power and can effectively explain the special semantic features of light verb construction,and provides sufficient justification for its translation research.It is expected that this study can be of some help to the following study of light verb constructions and promote the research of light verb constructions in translation and teaching activities. |
