English Abstracts

English Abstracts

Li Wenzhong’s views on corpus-based studies of cultural terms and their translation....................................................................................................................LI Wenzhong (1)

Li Wenzhong is vice-president of Corpus Linguistics Society of China. He obtained his Ph.D.from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1999. He is Professor at the National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. His research interests include corpus linguistics, applied linguistics and computer-assisted language learning. He has published extensively on corpus-based China English research, interlanguage studies, bilingual corpus studies and the theoretical issues of corpus linguistics.

Qian Yufang’s views on corpus-based studies of cultural terms and their translation.................................................................................................................QIAN Yufang (12)

Qian Yufang obtained her Ph.D. from Lancaster University, UK in 2008. She is Professor and Director of the Research Centre for Discourse and Communications, Zhejiang Media and Communication University, China. Her research interests include discourse studies, discourse communication and corpus linguistics. Her recent published book Discursive Constructions around Terrorism in the People’s Daily and The Sun before and after 9.11 by Peter Lang won the national prize for outstanding achievement of social sciences. She has published a series of journal articles on corpus-based media discourse analysis home and abroad. She is currently conducting a China National Social Science Foundation Project and a Ministry of Education Social Science Project.

The Europeanization of “personal pronoun + de”constructions in English-Chinese translation...........................................................................................GONG Xuexian & JIA Hui (19)

Drawing data from two Chinese comparable corpora and an English-Chinese parallel corpus,this paper investigates the use of “personal pronoun + de” (“PP + de” hereafter) constructions in English-Chinese translation. The results of the study show: 1) the frequency of “PP + de”constructions in Chinese translations is twice the frequency as is in the original Chinese texts,which renders some extent of “PP + de” redundancy and certain degree of Europeanization;2) compared with their original English texts, most of the redundant “PP + de” constructions are translated from pre-nominal possessive English pronouns, and some are added or converted from other parts of speech. In light of the findings, it is concluded that Europeanization in Chinese translations is relevant to translation universals, and also specific to the English-Chinese translation per se.

The syntactic and semantic genre orientation of ifconditionals..........................................................................................................................YU Tao (32)

If-conditionals in English, at the interface between syntax and semantics, are a core issue in grammatical studies. Few studies have touched upon genre dependency of if-conditionals. This paper analyzed two CLAWS-tagged English corpora (i.e. Crown and CLOB) to explore the syntactic and semantic features of if-conditionals across four genres. Data analysis shows that:1) The percentages of if-conditionals in four genres are ranked as follows: learned discourse＞press ＞ fiction ＞ general prose; 2) tense, aspect and modality representations of if-conditionals also differ across the four genres; 3) the distributions of open and hypothetical conditionals across the four genres vary greatly. It is therefore concluded that if-conditionals have a comparatively high-degree of genre dependency. However, similarities among genres in terms of frequency and syntax-semantics were also observed. As to frequency, learned discourse and general prose lie on different ends of the continuum, while press and fiction in the middle show great similarities. As to syntactic and semantic perspectives of if-conditionals, learned discourse and general prose are quite similar, as compared with press and fiction.

A corpus-based study on “China rise” in academic discourse of Chinese studies.......................................................ZHANG Zongbo, MA Xiaolei & ZHANG Haiyang (45)

This paper studies “China RISE (Note: the capitalized RISE accommodates all word forms of the lemma ‘rise’)” mentioned in the articles published in Journal of Contemporary China during 2011-2012 from such dimensions as field, attitude and the identity of author. On the basis of a self-compiled corpus, three main findings have been reached. Firstly, the majority of the scholars studying China’s rise are not Chinese scholars, but foreign scholars and overseas Chinese scholars.Secondly, while referring to China’s rise, nominal structures of “China RISE” are predominantly used, which can only generally express China’s rise without referring to the specific fields (such as politics, economy, military, culture, and science and technology) of China’s rise. In other words, scholars discuss China’s rise mainly from a macroscopic view, paying less attention to the specific fields of China’s rise. Thirdly, the attitudes of the contexts where “China RISE” appearsare mainly neutral. However, the number of negative attitudes is far greater than that of positive attitudes, and from the negative attitudes we can sense the “China Threat Theory” obviously. The methodology used in this paper to study “China RISE” is a new try, and we hope it can shed some light on the research of China issues in other fields.

A corpus-based study on nativization of high-frequency verbs of transformation in China’s English newspapers..............................................................................................HU Jian & ZHANG Ping (59)

This study collected from 1,681 China Daily texts with a total of 1,000,345 words, which include domestic news written by Chinese reporters from July 2011 to October 2011, compiling an MCCD(Micro Corpus of China Daily). The newspaper part of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used as the reference dataset. This study attempts to examine the use of high frequency verbs of creation and transformation in China’s English newspaper. The major findings are: 1) the senses of develop and grow covered in MCCD are fewer than those in COCA. Semantic extension (such as develop) can be found in MCCD. In addition, most high frequency verbs of creation and transformation display neutral semantic prosody in both MCCD and COCA. But the frequency with positive semantic features is significantly higher in MCCD than that in COCA;2) the high frequency verbs of creation and transformation tend to co-occur repeatedly with certain nouns in MCCD. Such collocations reflect the present situation of China; 3) grow as an intransitive verb occurs more frequently in MCCD than in COCA. Develop and increase are less often used as transitive verbs in MCCD than in COCA. Colligations frequently used in MCCD are closer to conventional syntactic structures of the Chinese language.

The linguistics research foci and trends in China from 2001 to 2011: A corpus-based review.........................................................................................CHEN Zeyuan & MA Bosen (71)

This paper investigates the linguistics research foci and trends in China from 2001 to 2011 by analyzing the terms extracted from the abstracts of linguistic papers published in Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Foreign Languages, Contemporary Linguistics, and Modern Foreign Languages. The analysis in terms of research content, types of research papers, languages studied and types of data demonstrates that: 1) cognitive linguistics has turned out to be the fourth hottest research field following that of syntax, lexicology and semantics, which have been of constant research interest to the linguistic circle in China; 2) compared with the study of syntax and other branches of linguistics, that of phonology has not attracted much attention from researchers; 3) there are more studies of Chinese than those of English or any other foreign languages; 4) with regard to the type of data studied, written language, rather than spokenlanguage or any other semiotic resources, has remained the dominant data source for domestic linguistic research.

The construction of a corpus of Preschoolers- and Teenagers-oriented Texts in English (PATTIE)..............................................................................................................................JI Jie (87)

This paper describes the design and construction of Preschoolers- and Teenagers-oriented Texts in English (PATTIE) corpus. This corpus contains published works written for children by adults. It includes five genres such as literature, textbooks, popular science, news and animation,and it covers different regional varieties such as British and American English. The corpus has been annotated with POS and metadata, and can be accessed online at BFSU CQPweb(http://124.193.83.252/cqp/). Compared with those adult-targeted corpora, the PATTIE corpus suits children’s cognition, values and interests, and features its distinct language usages, which can be applicable to children’s language learning and teaching.