A Contrastive Study Of Temporal Interpretation Of Relative Clause In English And Chinese

Time has always been the focus of linguistic study.The temporal interpretation of relative clause involves more complex situations and flexible readings,so it is worthy having further studies on it.This research is a contrastive analysis of temporal interpretation of English and Chinese relative clause so as to help language teaching and further theoretical research.It aims to figure out how to interpret the chronological order of events denoted by matrix clause(MC)and relative clause(RC),and how the Chinese interpretation rules differ from English.This research takes natural discourses in Mandarin Chinese as linguistic data,and systematically analyzes the relation between the event order and the linguistic features.Firstly,we introduce previous studies on the temporal interpretation of relative clause in English and Chinese,and then we take 438 Chinese relative clauses from BLCU Syntax Treebank 1.0 as the research data.We divide the clauses by the grammatical functions of the headword and analyze the chronological order of events in different categories.Finally,we discuss the results.We found that the viewpoint aspect of RC is the common determining factor of RC temporal interpretation in English and Chinese.The perfective viewpoint aspect leads to the RC<MC interpretation,and imperfective viewpoint aspect leads to the RC=MC interpretation.Viewpoint aspect is not a decisive factor of RC interpretation in English but is decisive in Chinese.Grammatical function influences the temporal interpretation to a certain extent:When the headword functions as the subject in MC,RC tends to contain telic verbs and represents established facts.When the headword functions as an object,RC tends to contain atelic verbs and represents states and future-oriented events.When the headword functions as oblique,the interpretation depends on the word order and semantic meaning.This factor is remarkable in Chinese,but rarely affects RC interpretation in English.In both English and Chinese,contextual information can override the default interpretation.Contextual information in Chinese includes certain types of MC predicates,temporal adverbials,resultative complements,and some other contextual information at the discourse level.It contributes to MC<RC interpretation,which is not a default interpretation in Chinese.