A Contrastive Study Of The Syntactic-Semantic Interface Of State-Change Events In English And Chinese

As a universal language structure,macro-events exhibit event fusion and are syntactically represented as subordinate clauses.They express both the framing event and the co-event,as well as the relationship between various conceptual elements,and reflects the syntactic representation of conceptual elements within a clause,making them an important part of cross-linguistic research on syntaxsemantics interface.State-change events,as one of the sub-events of macro-events,have been widely studied in the field,and researching English-Chinese statechange events have important value for syntax-semantics interface studies.Based on Talmy’s theory of macro events,this study takes state-change events as the research object,exhaustively retrieves high-frequency particles "up","out",and "off" in the TED English-Chinese parallel bilingual corpus,and obtains a closed small-scale corpus consisting of 525 verb-particle constructions and corresponding Chinese translations.Quantitative analysis and example interpretation were employed to explore semantic configuration structures,conceptual construction patterns,and provide preliminary insights into their cognitive motivations.The findings of this study are as follows:1)The semantic configuration structure and conceptual construction patterns of state-change events in English and Chinese belong to the same semantic category,but they exhibit variations in syntactic representations due to the influence of constructions.2)There is a correspondence between the semantic configuration structure,conceptual construction patterns,and construction representations in English and Chinese.3)English constructions correspond to multiple Chinese structures,but the translation process may involve the conversion of state-change semantics.4)The cognitive interpretation of state-change events in English and Chinese primarily relies on the interaction of image schemas,metaphors,and metonymy.Overall,this study goes beyond existing research in the theoretical analysis of state-change events and the comparative study between English and Chinese.Additionally,the findings shed light on teaching Chinese as a foreign language and English-Chinese translation.