英汉语言文化比较期末重点.doc

《英汉语言文化比较》讲义

第1讲 语言与文化概述
1. The relationship between language and culture.
Language and culture are inseparably intertwined.
(1) Language is a part of culture.
(2) Language is a manifestation of culture. (Culture manifests itself both in patterns of language and thought, and in forms of activity and behavior.)
(3) Language is the stimulus of culture (A flourished language can promote the development of culture.)
2. English speakers are good at abstract thinking while the Chinese are apt to think in terms of images.
3. English speakers prefer analytical thinking while the Chinese prefer comprehensive thinking.
4. English speakers think more in a linear way while the Chinese think more or less in a curving way.
5. According to Whorf hypothesis, “The language that an individual speaks facilitates particular ways of thinking.”

第2讲 英汉语发展简史1
1. Based on morphological classification (形态分类法), English belongs to inflected language (屈折语), while Chinese belongs to isolating language (孤立语).
2. Based on structural classification (结构分类法), both English and Chinese belong to analytic language (分析语).
3. Based on genetic classification (谱系分类法), English belongs to Indo-European Language Family, and Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan Language Family.
4. English is a West Germanic (西日耳曼语支) language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders.
5. English is a phoneme language (表音文字) and Chinese is an ideographic language (表意文字).
6. The first people in England about whose language we have definite knowledge are the Celts.
7. After the Norman Conquest, English entered the period of Middle English.
8. The period from 450 to 1150 is known as Old English. From 1150 to 1500 the language is known as Middle English. The language since 1500 is called Modern English (1500-1700, early Modern English, 1700 until now, later Modern English).
9. The main differences between Chinese words and English words: a) Letters in English are like strokes in Chinese. b) Morphemes in English are like radicals in Chinese. c) Chinese associative compounds (会意字) are like English compound words.

第3讲 英汉语发展简史2
1. Chinese and most related languages share features that make them unlike most Western languages: They are monosyllabic, have even less inflection than English, and are tonal.
2. In Chinese, a syllabic structure has three essential components: initials (声母), finals (韵母), and tones (声调). Chinese pinyin system has 21 initial consonants, 36 final vowels and 4 tones.
3. According to Xu Shen’s (许慎) research, Chinese characters can be divided into six groups: 1) Pictographs (≈4%) 象形; 2) Ideographs (≈1%) 指事; 3) Logical Aggregates (≈13%) 会意; 4) Phonetic Complexes (≈82%) 形声; 5) Associative Transformations (a small portion) 转注; 6) Borrowings (a small portion) 假借.

第4讲 英汉语构词法
1. Word formation in English:
1) Compounding (合成法): Two or more words are joined together to form a new word. (For example: home + work → homework)
2) Prefixation (前缀法): Prefixation is the formation of new words by adding prefixes to stems. Prefixes do not generally change the word-class of the stem but only modify its meaning. (For example: Pejorative prefixes (贬义前缀): mal-, pseudo-, mis-, ill-).
3) Suffixation (后缀法): Suffixation is the formation of new words by adding suffixes to stems. Unlike prefixes which primarily change the meaning of the stem, the primary function of suffixes is to change the grammatical function of stems.
4) Conversion (转化法): Conversion is a word-formation whereby a word of a certain word-class is shifted into a word of another without the addition of an affix. It is also called zero derivation (零位派生). (For example: 1) Problems snowballed by the hour. 2) Sandwich the two bread halves together and cut into 1-inch-wide slices.)
5) Shortening (缩略法)
6) Blending (拼缀法): Blending is a process of word-formation in which a new word is formed by combining parts of two words. The result of such a process is called a blend. Blending is a process of both compounding and abbreviation. For example, smog (smoke＋fog).
7) Back-formation (逆成法): a process of word-formation by which a word is created by the deletion of a supposed suffix. It is also known as a reverse derivation.
8) Eponyms
9) Toponyms
2. Word formation in Chinese:
1) The overwhelming majority of the Old-Chinese morphemes are mono-syllabic.
2) 61% of the 3,000 most commonly used Chinese words are disyllabic.
3) Chinese prefixes mostly involve morphemes such as 老, 小, 第, and 初.
4) Some so-called Chinese suffixes are added as a way of nominalization, like 度, 性, etc.

第5讲 英汉词语的文化内涵比较1
1. In Chinese, the word xīn (心) that primarily denotes the heart organ may also refer to the “organ for thinking” and the “seat of thought and emotions”.
2. In contrast, according to the Western view, heart is seen as the center of emotions/feelings and the head (the locus of the brain with which the mind is associated) as the center of thought.
3. Based on the metaphor “heart as a physical entity”, the following words are formed in Chinese: 心房, 心窝, 心田, 心地, and 心弦.
4. Research proves that if a language only has two color words, they must be black and white; if the language has the third color word, it must be red; if it has the fourth one, it must be yellow or green.

第6讲 英汉词语的文化内涵比较2
1. Dog has a negative connotation in “a dog in the manger”.
2. Traditionally, people have talked about “fixed expressions”, stressing the fixedness of these expressions, but corpus studies have shown that many of the phrases can actually be varied.
3. An idiom is a fixed or semi-fixed expression whose meaning cannot be deduced from its parts. But very few idioms are 100% fixed.

第7讲 英语抽象名词和汉语具体名词
1. The plural forms of abstract English nouns often have the function of concretization, for example, ratings, attractions and breakdowns.

第8讲 形合与意合
1. Hypotaxis (形合): The dependent or subordinate relationship of clauses with connectives. For example: It was cold because the snows came.
2. Parataxis (意合): The arranging of clauses or phrases without connectives showing the relations between them. For example: It was cold; the snows came.

第9讲 英汉句法比较
1. A topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax to emphasize the topic–comment structure of the sentence. Chinese is considered to be a topic-prominent language, where the topic of the sentence takes precedence in the sentence.
2. A subject-prominent language (e.g. English) is a language in which the grammatical units of subject and predicate (S V) are basic to the structure of sentences and in which sentences usually have subject-predicate structure.

第10讲 英语被动句和汉语主动句
1. English uses far more passive sentences than Chinese./ Passive voice sentences are more common in English than in Chinese.
2. Many sentences in English have inanimate/impersonal subjects (无灵主语), while Chinese use this pattern less frequently. For example, “The thick carpet on the corridor killed the sound of my footsteps.”

第11讲 语篇对比1
1. According to Halliday and Hasan, collocation is “cohesion that is achieved through the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur”. The association is achieved when the lexical items have a tendency to appear in similar lexical environments or when they are related lexicosemantically.
2. a) This is a fine hall you have here. I’m proud to be lecturing in it. (Reference)
b) This is a fine hall you have here. I’ve never lectured in a finer one. (Substitution)
c) This is a fine hall you have here. I’ve never lectured in a finer. (Ellipsis)

第12讲 语篇对比2
1. The normal pattern to develop an English paragraph: topic sentence (main point/ central thought) – supporting details.

第13讲 隐喻、文化和世界观
1. Sports metaphors are used by all Americans, regardless of class, professions, race, age or gender. The reasons are as follows:
1) Most Americans believe competition to be one quality that has made America great.
2) “Being the best” American mentality has often turned everyday life into a sport game. People compete in almost everything.
3) American schools are another contributing factor to the American sports mania. In many schools, athletics outweighs all other programs in terms of money and attention received.
4) As a country, from the national to the local level, Americans go out of their way to honor athletes.
2. The literal use of 吃 includes 吃面, 吃饭. (not吃惊, 吃香, 吃官司, 吃败仗). The literal use of 吃饭includes 吃冷饭. (not 吃干饭, 吃闲饭, 吃软饭)

第14讲 基于语料库的英汉语比较与翻译考察
1. Corpus (pl. corpora or corpuses): a collection of text, now usually in machine-readable form and compiled to be representative of a particular kind of language and often provided with some kind of annotation.
2. Parallel corpus is most useful for translation studies.

第15讲 个人主义与集体主义
1. Highly individualistic cultures include the U.S., Australia, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Italy. Some examples of collectivist cultures include India, Japan and China.
Short Answer Questions:
1. What are the different types of transliterations (音译)? Give the Chinese borrowings from English as examples.
Answer: The first type is phonetic loans: 摩登、咖啡、咖喱、巧克力、克隆。
The second type adds a category character to bring out the exact meaning: 三文鱼、保龄球、爵士乐、艾滋病。
The third type makes good use of the Chinese characters that enhance the meanings： 嬉皮士、的确良，席梦思，蹦极。

2. Sports metaphors are used by all Americans, regardless of class, professions, race, age or gender. Explain its reasons.
Answer: 见第13讲

3. What are the similarities and differences between English compounds and Chinese compounds?
Answer: English Compound words: Two or more words joined together to form a new word, while the meaning of a compound is not always the sum of the meanings of its parts. The two words in a compound can be written separately, like full moon, or written as one, like notebook, or with a hyphen, like blue-green.
Compounding is also a most important means of forming secondary words in Chinese. There are five types of such compositions.
Parallel: 语言，挑剔，etc.
Modifier + modified: 粉红，古代，etc.
Subject + predicate: 年轻，地震，etc.
Verb + object: 说话，安心，etc.
Verb + complement: 说服，落实,etc.

4. What is the similarity and difference between English suffix “-ism” and Chinese “主义”?
Answer: –ism 在英语中有多重含义，如：
1、...的行为（或结果）：criticism；
2、...的状态或品质：heroism；
3、...的教义（或体系、运动）：Buddhism；
4、...的不公平对待（或敌意）：racism；
5、...的语言特点：Americanism；
6、健康状况、疾病：alcoholism
《现代汉语词典》提供的“主义”释义如下：1、对客观世界、社会生活以及学术问题等所持有的系统的理论和主张，如马克思主义，达尔文主义，现实主义，浪漫主义；2、思想作风，如本位主义，主观主义；3、一定的社会制度，政治经济体系，如社会主义，资本主义。
在“歧视”（如ageism，racism）、“病症”（alcoholism，Autism）、“宗教”（Buddhism，Judaism，Taoism）情况下，-ism就无法译为“主义”。

Comparison and Comments
1. Compare the following paragraph with its translation and analyze the differences between Chinese and English language based on the division of Parataxis and Hypotaxis.
Original poem: 上邪！ / 我欲与君相知，/ 长命无绝衰。/ 山无陵， / 江水为竭，/ 冬雷震震， / 夏雨雪， / 天地合， / 乃敢与君绝。
Translation: Oh heaven above!/ I will shower you with my love./It will endure despite the fates above./ When the mountains do not rise high,/ Or the rivers run dry,/ Or winter thunders come by,/ Or summer snows fly,/ Or the earth meets the sky,/ Only then shall I abandon my love.
Answer: Parataxis refers to the arranging of clauses or phrases without connectives showing the relations between them. For example: It was cold; the snows came. Hypotaxis refers to the dependent or subordinate relationship of clauses with connectives. For example: It was cold because the snows came.
Old Chinese is a typical paratactic language. In the original poem, there are no connectives. Modern English is a hypotactic language. In the English translation, there are connectives including despite, when, and or.

2. What are the reference meanings of the Chinese word 天, and how to render it into English in different contexts? Give examples to support.
Answer: 1) The most common meaning of 天 can be expressed by sky, e.g. 蓝天白云, white cloud in a blue sky.
2) Metaphorically 天 may mean “high” or “far away”, such as 天际，天涯，which refer to the horizon or “the end of the world”.
3) An extended reference of 天is “time” or “weather”, which is derived from its basic meaning sky. 天不早了can be translated as “it’s getting late”. 阴天 cloudy.
4) 天 can refer to “nature”， such as 天人合一，人定胜天。
5) 天 could refer to the supreme god in Heaven, who dominates the whole world, as in 老天保佑。

3. Read the following concordance, summarize the linguistic features of English word “mouthful” and compare it with Chinese classifier（量词） “口”.

Answer: 1）mouthful 在英语中有量词倾向。其基本结构为a mouthful of .
2) 其后加的名词，可以是食物，如corn, 也可以是非食物，如lie，说明mouthful也有词义虚化倾向。
3）英语用mouth做名词，用mouthful做量词，这跟汉语的“口”既作名词又作量词不同。
4）mouthful作量词使用，也可不加名词。直接用a mouthful。
5）汉语的量词“口”，可以是食物，也可以是非食物，这点和mouthful相同。
6）语料中似乎未见mouthfuls，这和汉语的“好几口”，“两口”稍不同。

Language Data Interpretation
1. The following diagram is the changing frequency of the two words individualism and collectivism in American Google Books. What does this reveal?

Answer: From the diagram we can make the following conclusions:
(1) Individualism is more important than collectivism in Western culture for the former is more frequent.
(2) In the 1930s and 1990s, individualism welcomes its peaks, which means the two periods above mentioned are the decades when society has become more individualistic.
(3) The 1940s witnessed the highest frequency of collectivism perhaps because western people feel the importance of collectivism during World War II.
(4) Individualism declines during mid-1990s, which probably means western people consider it more useful to unite as a whole, particularly after the 911 crash.

2. The following is a concordance of the word Confucianism based on COCA corpus, which consists of text of American English from 1990 to 2012. Try to describe and analye the American report about confucianism.

Answer: From the concordance, the following conclusion can be made:
(1) Confucianism is considered to be the Chinese and East Asian tradition (including North Korea).
(2) There is a revival of Confucianism in China in recent years.
(3) Confucianism is often mentioned together with other religions, like Taoism.
(4) Confucianism is considered to be related to collectivism.

3. Analyze this table and explain the differences between maybe and perhaps in terms of genre.

Answer: Table 3.1 shows that maybe is more frequent than perhaps in two subcorpora (spoken and fiction), equally frequent in one (newspapers) and less frequent in two (magazines and academic). Academic writing is more formal while spoken and fiction lie in informal category. Therefore, from Table 3.1, we can see maybe is relatively more informal than perhaps.
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