On The English Sentence Patterns For Modern Chinese De Constructions

De constructions studied in this paper are the sentences containing verbs or adjectives followed by structural auxiliary word“De”to connect the complement part.With the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,this paper takes three modern Chinese novels as the source of corpora and makes classification and translation studies on Chinese De constructions.An online bilingual parallel corpus of Luxun’s Call to Arms and Wandering from the Pool of Bilingual Parallel Corpora of Chinese Classics and a self-built bilingual parallel corpus of Fortress Besieged are adopted in this study.Grammar blending process is applied to divide De constructions into several classifications and explore syntactic features and semantic relationships for presenting abundant semantic meanings of De constructions.Finally,several corresponding translation structures and patterns of modern Chinese De constructions are concluded in order to provide a certain reference in the translation.Modern Chinese De constructions could be divided into two types:declarative causative De constructions and descriptive non-causative De constructions.In this paper,the contents before and after the structural auxiliary word“De”are respectively named the former part and the latter part.In terms of syntactic structures,both the former part and the latter part contain one subject-predicate structure in causative De constructions.From the perspective of semantics,there is a causative relationship between the former part and the latter part in causative De constructions.According to the relation between V_erb and O_bject,the paper further divides causative De constructions into four sub-types,including SV_（+）OC type where V_erbachieves complete dominance toward the O_bject,SV_（-）OC type where V_erb achieves indirect dominance toward the O_bject,SV_（0）OC type where V_erb achieves no dominance toward the O_bject,and SVO_（S）C type where O_bject is the real conductor of the action V_erb.In terms of syntactic structures,there is one subject-predicate structure in non-causative De constructions.From the perspective of semantics,the latter part is the supplement of the former part in causative De constructions.According to the semantic orientation of C_omplement in the latter part,the paper further divides non-causative De constructions into two sub-types,including SVO_（S）type where semantic orientation of C_omplement directly points to the S_ubject and SVO_（V）type where semantic orientation of C_omplement directly points to the V_erb.Since the S_ubject in14%non-causative De constructions,amounting to 94 sentences,is the patient of the event,the paper names these sentences S_（O）VO type for the third sub-type.The results show that modern Chinese De constructions could be translated into several English sentence patterns.In terms of causative De constructions,four types of English structures could be summarized,including adverbial structures,complex object structures,two independent clauses,and single object structures.For SV_（+）OC type,adverbial structures and complex object structures are two major English sentence patterns.For SV_（-）OC type and SV_（0）OC type,the usage of adverbial structures is far more frequent than the other three types of translation structures.For SVO_（S）C type,two independent clauses,together with adverbial structures,are preferred patterns for translation.In terms of non-causative De constructions,five types of English structures could be summarized,involving adverbial structures,predicative structures,attributive structures,passive structures,and translation strategies.For SVC_（S）type,adverbial structures are primary for translation,however,predicative structures and attributive structures are preferred as well.For SVC_（V）type,adverbial structures reach much larger proportion than the other four types of translation structures.For S_（O）VC type,adverbial structures,passive structures and translation strategies are equally important English sentence patterns.Although adverbial structures are widely used in the translation of both causative and non-causative De constructions,the types of adverbials are quite different in the usage.Adverbials of result,reason and concomitant are three top types used in causative De constructions,while adverbial of manner,degree and result are three top types used in non-causative De constructions.In addition,seven sub-types of De constructions prefer different types of adverbials.Above all,the classification of modern Chinese De constructions is significant to guide the study on English translation of such constructions.