A Monographic Study On The Verbs In The Pilgrim’s Progress

The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin is a Chinese work written by William Chalmers Burns who is the British missionary in China in the late Qing dynasty.The target language used by William Chalmers Burns is Beijing mandarin,so his translated works can reflect the Chinese face in the late Qing dynasty to some extent.This paper studies the verbs in The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin,using corpus method,synchronic and diachronic comparison method,induction method,etc.,to classify and describe the verbs from the internal structure of the verbs and the combination of "semantics and grammar".The research shows that the internal structure of the verbs in The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin is similar to that in modern Chinese.There is little difference in the proportion of pure words and compound words in the total number of verbs.Compound words are mainly two-syllable compound words,which can be divided into five types: associative,positive,complementary,subject-verb and verbobject.The number of combined verbs is the largest,followed by verb-object verbs.There are no transliterated loanwords in The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin,so it can be seen that in the process of translating verbs,William Chalmers Burns adopts semantic translation rather than transliteration.The verbs in The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin can be divided into ten categories according to their semantic categories,namely specific action verbs,abstract action verbs,speech verbs,state verbs,mental verbs,tendency verbs,willing verbs,perceptive verbs,causative verbs and judgment verbs.The research shows that The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin pays great attention to people’s words and deeds in terms of content,and clearly loves and hates.Most of the speech verbs are disyllabic words,and the disyllabic way is to increase the way of expression of speech act,to increase the morpheme indicating the degree of speech act and to increase the morpheme indicating the result of speech act.Most state verbs are intransitive verbs.Through comparative studies,on the diachronic level,the differences between The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin and modern Chinese are mainly reflected in four aspects: first,the collocation objects of words are different;The second is the disappearance of several meanings;Thirdly,the meaning of words is replaced by different symbols,resulting in new words,which are embodied in the substitution of Chinese characters and the reversal of morpheme positions.The increase or decrease of morphemes.At the same time,it is found that some verbs in ancient Chinese have been preserved,such as kao,zhi and suo.At the synchronic level,it is found that the oral color of verbs is reflected in erhua words,and there are also many Beijing dialect words.Through comparative studies,the research theory of Joseph Edkins’ s A Grammar of the Chinese Colloquial Language Commonlt Called the Mandarin Dialect and the application of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin on verbs are mutually verified.It can be seen from the translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin that William Chalmers Burns mastered and accurately used complement,which made the language of The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin more refined.In terms of the form of verb overlap,the way of verb overlap adopted by William Chalmers Burns is in line with the conclusion in Joseph Edkins’ s A Grammar of the Chinese Colloquial Language Commonlt Called the Mandarin Dialect.There are also some special verbs worth analyzing in The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin,including words with different shapes,polysemous words.This paper also focuses on the grammatical features of the verbs in The Pilgrim’s Progress in Mandarin,especially the overlapping forms and special syntactic structures.