Keywords: Contrasting relational structure, paired marker words shift
I. Introduction
The contrastive structure between English and Chinese is a unique marginal sentence pattern. Paired "the+ comparative" appears in English and paired "yue" appears in Chinese, as shown in the following example (1-4), both of which are used to connect two clauses. Different from traditional conjunctions, they play a certain syntactic function in sentences. In other words, this structure is not connected by functional genres such as conjunctions, but by two identical lexical genres. In the literature, the contrastive structure of English mainly comes from Culicover &; Jackendorff (1999), which corresponds to the Chinese "Yue ... Yue ..." structure, is rarely noticed. Based on the uniqueness of this structure, this paper attempts to make a comprehensive study of English-Chinese contrastive structures.
(1) The more you eat, the less you want it.
The harder he studies, the better his grades will be.
(3) The more people leave, the worse she feels.
The more he talks, the more unhappy I am.
Second, the structure of English contrastive relationship
The English contrastive structure is "the more" ... the more ... "structure, which is characterized by the appearance of paired signs. The sentences with paired signs" the+ comparative "seem to be parallel, but they are not. In view of the different parts of speech of paired markers and their different functions in sentences, according to the parts of speech, this structure can be divided into two different types in clauses:
1.AP type. The "the+ comparative" part is an adjective, which can be used as both an predicative (5) and an attributive (6) in a sentence.
(5) The more careful we are, the more we find.
The more people leave, the more sad she is.
2.advp type. Adverbial component, mainly used as adverbial in sentences.
The closer we look, the more we will find.
The more you talk, the more I understand.
Thirdly, the semantic relationship between English comparative clauses.
Kulige & ampJackendoff (1999) once discussed the semantic relationship between two clauses in English contrastive structure, and thought that they were the master-slave semantic relationship. The first clause is the clause of the sentence, and the second sentence is the main clause of the sentence. This paper inherits their views and tries to prove that the corresponding structure in Chinese is also a master-slave relationship in the next section. There are mainly the following linguistic facts to prove that there is a master-slave relationship between two clauses:
First, the morphological words of subjunctive mood can be added after the second clause, but not after the first clause, indicating that the second clause is the main sentence of the sentence.
The more I ask him for, the more John pays me. ..
B.the more I ask John for, the more he pays me.
Secondly, the question of ambivalence can be used to ask the second clause, not the first clause, which further proves that the second clause is the main clause.
The more John gets, the more he pays me, doesn't he?
B.the more John gets, the more he pays me, doesn't he?
Third, the auxiliary verb "will" can only appear in the second clause, but not in the first clause. Since English conditional clauses, even the future tense, must be expressed in the simple present tense (1 1c, d), it further shows that the first clause is a clause and the second clause is a main clause.
The more John gets, the more he pays me.
B.the more John gets, the more he pays me.
C. If she invites me to the party, I will send her a beautiful gift.
D. If she invites me to the party, I will send her a beautiful gift.
Fourth, the pronoun is postpositioned, which means that the first clause is a clause. The personal pronoun in this clause has a antecedent noun and can refer back to this pronoun in the main clause.
The more John gets, the more he pays me.
The more John gets, the more he pays me.
C. If John gets more, he will pay me more.
D. If John gets more, he will pay me more.
Fourth, the structure of Chinese contrastive relationship
Because the word "yue" in Chinese is basically an adverb, it is meaningless to divide this structural type according to the part of speech. Chinese is a relatively loose language, and the combination form between sentences is very free. According to the combination forms of sentences, we can roughly distinguish four types of comparative sentences, as follows (1-4). But we take (1) standard sentence as the research object.
1. Standard. This kind of sentence consists of two clauses, each with an independent subject and predicate, separated by commas.
(13) The better the children do in the exam, the happier I feel.
(14) The more she said, the more unhappy I became.
2. compact type. This type of sentence also has two sentences, but they both have subjects, and there is no comma between the two clauses.
(15) The more she listened, the more confused she became.
(16) The more you talk, the sadder you get.
Two clauses * * * share a subject, and we can regard either subject as empty. To sum up, a * * * has the following two situations (a) and (b):
In sentence (a), the two clauses are arranged linearly, while in sentences (b) and (c), the first clause is contained in the second clause. In any case, these three sentence structures can be regarded as the result of two complete clauses, in which the subject of one clause is omitted. As shown in (2 1)(22), sentence (a) can be obtained by omitting the subject and comma of the second clause, sentence (b) can be obtained by omitting the subject sum of the first clause and including it in the second clause, and sentence (c) can be obtained by omitting the subject of the second clause and including it in the second clause.
(2 1) The more he listened, the more confused he became.
The more I talk about it, the sadder it gets.
Step 3 chain
This kind of sentence generally consists of three clauses, and the middle clause plays two roles: it can form a standard comparative sentence with the first clause and appear as the second clause at this time; It can also form a standard comparative sentence with the third clause, in which case it appears as the standard first clause. For example:
(23) The desires of the three sisters are insatiable. The older you get, the more leisure you have, and the more you envy other people's lives.
This article is the original appearance of the full text. Users who don't have a PDF browser download and install the original text first. (24) The more contradictions between people, the more people in Guangzhou know about the mayor, and the less misunderstandings and rumors there are.
Because the middle clause plays a dual role in the whole sentence, we can think that this type of sentence consists of two standard types of sentences, and one of them is omitted for economic reasons.
(25) The desires of the three sisters are insatiable, and the older they get, the more leisure they get; The more leisure you get, the more you envy other people's lives.
(26) The more contradictory, the more Guangzhou people know about the mayor; The more people in Guangzhou know about the mayor, the less misunderstandings and rumors there are about him.
4. Reverse ring
The anti-cyclic comparative sentence consists of four clauses. The first two clauses and the last two clauses each become a standard comparative sentence. Its remarkable feature is that the last two clauses are the inversion of the first two clauses, that is, the logical relationship between the two clauses has changed.
(27) The meaner you are, the meaner you are; I didn't borrow money from you, so don't panic.
(28) With the protection of the Holy Family, those who attacked Tian Wenjing were suspected to have come for the New Deal and for themselves. The more you attack and protect, the more you protect and attack.
Although this kind of anti-cyclical sentence shares a middle clause with the serial sentence, the middle repeated clause cannot be omitted in the anti-cyclical sentence.
(29)* The more, the meaner.
(30)* The more you attack, the more you protect and attack.
Fifth, the semantic relationship between Chinese contrastive sentences.
The semantic relationship between clauses mainly starts from standard sentences, and there is a certain logical relationship between the two clauses. Among them, it is incomplete to remove any clause.
(3 1)* The more you give.
The more you get.
In addition, "Yue" can also be used as a conjunction to connect two clauses in a sentence, because if any word "Yue" is removed, the sentence will be ungrammatical.
The more you give, the more you get.
The more you give, the more you get.
As for the relationship between the two clauses, whether it is parallel or subordinate, it needs further proof. If it is a parallel relationship, it should be possible to add conjunctions such as "and" (indicating juxtaposition) or "but" (indicating turning point), but this is not the case.
The more you give, the more you get.
The more you give, the more you get.
Therefore, we try to test whether there is subordination between two clauses from several aspects.
First of all, the modal particle "ma" in the main sentence can be placed after the second sentence, but not after the first sentence.
The more you give, the more you gain?
(38)* The more you give, the more you gain.
Second, the word "JIU" used in the main sentence can only be placed in the second sentence.
The more you give, the more you get.
(40)* The more you give, the more you gain.
Thirdly, conjunctions such as "if" and "once" can appear in the first clause, forming a conditional relationship between clauses.
(4 1) The more you get, the more you pay.
The more you get, the more you give.
As can be seen from the above test results, the relationship between the two clauses is subordinate to the main clause. The first clause is a clause, and the second clause is a main clause.
6. Syntactic transformation of English-Chinese contrastive structure.
The "the+ comparative" part in English contrastive structure has shifted, and the "the+ comparative" part in each clause has moved from its original position to the position at the beginning of the sentence, leaving traces in its original position.
Why are existing sentences the result of displacement? Kuligai & ampJackendoff (1999) made a detailed investigation from the syntactic point of view, and found that the comparative component at the beginning of the clause in this structure directly depends on the gap in the sentence. Both clauses show infinite dependence.
Thirdly, illegal movement not only causes strong wh- island effect, but also causes weak wh- island effect.
All these show that the "the+ comparison" part in this structure has the characteristics of wh- question, and its shift rule is similar to wh- question. Both of them move from the position in the original sentence to the position at the beginning of the sentence [Spec, CP], leaving traces in the original position.
Similarly, the structure of "Yue …… Yue ………" in Chinese is the same as that of Chinese special interrogative sentences, and there is no need to shift it. This leads to another question: Why do English comparative sentences need to be shifted, while Chinese comparative sentences don't? According to the transformation theory, transformation is driven by features, and the grammatical features of some genres must be checked. In English interrogative sentences, the [+wh] feature of wh- words needs to be checked, which leads to displacement, while the Chinese special interrogative word "What" has the [-wh] feature, so it doesn't need to be checked, so the interrogative words don't need to be shifted. Similarly, in the comparative relational structure, we assume that English "the+comparative" has the characteristics of [+comparative] and needs to be checked, which leads to this part moving to the front of the sentence to eliminate this unreadable feature, while Chinese "Yue" has the characteristics of [-comparative] and can be read by itself, so it is not necessary to move to the beginning of the sentence for checking.
Seven. Concluding remarks
This paper makes a systematic study of English-Chinese contrastive structures from the semantic and syntactic perspectives, and finds that English-Chinese contrastive structures are semantically composed of a clause and a main clause. Syntactically, the paired marker words connecting two clauses are all lexical categories, not functional categories. Pairs of markers have shifted in English, but they remain in their original positions in Chinese. The shift of English comparative structure is driven by the indecipherability of [+comparative], while the word "Yue" in Chinese comparative structure does not have this feature, so it is unnecessary to shift.
References:
Peter Kurokov. Ray Jackdorf. A marginal point of view: English is more relevant. Language query1999.30 (4): 543-571.
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