A Contrastive Study of Aspectuality in German, English, and Chinese

A Contrastive Study of Aspectuality in German, English, and Chinese PDF

Author: Lihua Zhang

Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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This study systematically contrasts aspectuality in German, English, and Chinese by investigating a set of rich data from literary texts. It uses a cognitive approach to examine aspectual semantics and relationships between meaning and form involving the expression and categorization of aspectual situations in three languages. It elucidates language-specific realizations of aspectual conceptualization in each of the three languages and reveals aspectually motivated regularities in translations among these languages.

Biblical Translation in Chinese and Greek

Biblical Translation in Chinese and Greek PDF

Author: Toshikazu S. Foley

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 9004178651

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This study integrates three independent subjects - translation theory, Mandarin aspect, and Greek aspect - for the purpose of formulating a working theory applicable to translating the Bible. The primary objectives are defined in terms of grammatical translation of Greek aspect into Mandarin aspect at the discourse level. A historical overview of the Chinese Bible is provided as a way of introducing major translation issues related to linguistic, conceptual, and logistical challenges. The proposed theory provides the translator with a powerful tool, which is tested in two sample passages from John 18-19 and 1 Corinthians 15. Provided, also, are critical reviews of over sixty Chinese Bible versions, Nestorian, Manichaean, Catholic documents, and a translation written according to the proposed theory.

Corpus-based Language Studies

Corpus-based Language Studies PDF

Author: Tony McEnery

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780415286237

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Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles

Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles PDF

Author: Jian Kang Loar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-11-07

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1351257668

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Aspect in Mandarin Chinese plays an important role in interpreting the temporal information of a sentence. It is an important verbal category, which is concerned with the speaker’s viewpoint or perspective on a situation: whether the situation is presented as complete (perfective aspect) or as ongoing (imperfective aspect), etc. Learning to understand the aspect particles or markers, and use them correctly, has always been one of the most difficult tasks for learners of Chinese. Learn to Use Chinese Aspect Particles is a pedagogical guide designed to equip teachers with necessary aspectual theoretical knowledge, and is aimed at in-service or trainee teachers, and intermediate or advanced students to reinforce teaching and learning. Challenging exercises are designed and explanations for the correct use of an aspect particle are given, thus making the book more useable and convenient to teachers and enhancing the practical reference value of the book.

Aspect in Mandarin Chinese

Aspect in Mandarin Chinese PDF

Author: Richard Xiao

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9789027230836

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Chinese, as an aspect language, has played an important role in the development of aspect theory. This book is a systematic and structured exploration of the linguistic devices that Mandarin Chinese employs to express aspectual meanings. The work presented here is the first corpus-based account of aspect in Chinese, encompassing both situation aspect and viewpoint aspect. In using corpus data, the book seeks to achieve a marriage between theory-driven and corpus-based approaches to linguistics. The corpus-based model presented explores aspect at both the semantic and grammatical levels. At the semantic level a two-level model of situation aspect is proposed, which covers both the lexical and sentential levels, thus giving a better account of the compositional nature of situation aspect. At the grammatical level four perfective and four imperfective aspects in Chinese are explored in detail. This exploration corrects many intuition-based misconceptions, and associated misleading conclusions, about aspect in Chinese common in the literature.

Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse

Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse PDF

Author: Wendan Li

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-02-19

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 9004360883

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In Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse Wendan Li offers a comprehensive account of how Chinese, as a morphologically challenged language, uses grammatical means to highlight (or foreground) major events of a narrative and to demote (or background) other supporting descriptions.

Where Centering Meets Chinese Discourse

Where Centering Meets Chinese Discourse PDF

Author: Saina Wuyun

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 9811586667

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This book addresses the question: What can close discourse analysis contribute to the understanding of language? To do so, it presents a centering theory-based computational approach to discourse analysis concerning Chinese bei passive sentences, disposal ba constructions, ditransitive gei sentences, and locative fang sentences. The book first discusses the use of discourse analysis in the context of bei and ba constructions and then demonstrates how discourse analysis can contribute to the syntactic and semantic studies of these sentences. It also examines the various thematic roles differentiated in these four special sentence patterns, namely agent, recipient, theme/patient, and locative, and reveals the various degrees of discourse accessibility of these thematic roles. Exploring the correlation between centering theory and Chinese discourse, the book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in discourse analysis and Chinese special sentential structures, especially the formal approaches to these issues.

The Chinese Aspectual System

The Chinese Aspectual System PDF

Author: Hongzhi Xu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-07-22

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9811634084

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This book presents a theoretical study on aspect in Chinese, including both situation and viewpoint aspects. Unlike previous studies, which have largely classified linguistic units into different situation types, this study defines a set of ontological event types that are conceptually universal and on the basis of which different languages employ various linguistic devices to describe such events. To do so, it focuses on a particular component of events, namely the viewpoint aspect. It includes and discusses a wealth of examples to show how such ontological events are realized in Chinese. In addition, the study discusses how Chinese modal verbs and adverbs affect the distribution of viewpoint aspects associated with certain situation types. In turn, the book demonstrates how the proposed linguistic theory can be used in a computational context. Simply identifying events in terms of the verbs and their arguments is insufficient for real situations such as understanding the factivity and the logical/temporal relations between events. The proposed framework offers the possibility of analyzing events in Chinese text, yielding deep semantic information.

Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics

Modality in Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics PDF

Author: Werner Abraham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-17

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1108861083

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What do we mean when we say things like 'If only we knew what he was up to!' Clearly this is more than just a message, or a question to our addressee. We are expressing simultaneously that we don't know, and also that we wish to know. Several modes of encoding contribute to such modalities of expression: word order, subordinating subjunctions, sentences that are subordinated but nevertheless occur autonomously, and attitudinal discourse adverbs which, far beyond lexical adverbials of modality, allow the speaker and the listener to presuppose full agreement, partial agreement under presupposed conditions, or negotiation of common ground. This state of the art survey proposes a new model of modality, drawing on data from a variety of Germanic and Slavic languages to find out what is cross-linguistically universal about modality, and to argue that it is a constitutive part of human cognition.