Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of Study
Some phrases, like 吃的、玩的、昨天的、开车, are called de phrase or de construction in Chinese by different researchers. In this research, the latter name (de construction) is used. As for the definition of de construction, scholars have their own views. Liu (1990) proposes that de construction is a nominal polarization structure which omits the head word and the combination of the content word and de constitutes this nominal structure. Similar to Liu’s definition, Yuan & Guo (1997) argues that de construction is a structure that structural auxiliary “de” is attached after word or phrase to replace noun. They think that de construction can be considered as a nominal polarization phrase which omits the head word. Xing (2002) defines de construction as an attributive-head structure of “X + de + Y”. If Y doesn’t appear, the structure (“X + de”) is de construction. Lu (2003) proposes that de construction is a phrase that can indicate reference and the combination of the content word and de make up de construction. For the purpose of this study, Liu’s definition of de construction revised is used: de construction is a nominal polarization structure which omits the head word and in this construction, de is attached after content word, phrase or sentence. Its form is “X + de”. De construction has always been one of the most frequently discussed structures in modern Chinese. And it has very complicated distribution and characteristics. Because of these, de construction attracts many Chinese linguists to explore it. However, due to its complication, it seems difficult to reach an agreement on the nature of de construction. The nature of de has been a controversial issue among the scholars. So far, de has been classified into several kinds. The first one is the possessive marker, such as 我的电脑 (my computer); the second one is the adjective marker, such as 漂亮的花儿(beautiful flowers); the third one is the nominal marker, such as 做饭的人 (the person who cooks). Many researchers have diverged on the classification of de (Zhu, 1961; Lv, 1982; Huang, 1982; Liu, 1990; Shi, 2000; Guo, 2000; Lu, 2003). Among them, the most influential and persuasive one is Zhu’s classification. He argues that de can be classified into three types: adverbial marker, adjective marker, and nominal marker.
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1.2 Significance and Purpose of Study
Despite the fact that a large number of scholars are studying de construction and have obtained great success, little attention has been paid to de construction in legislative texts. Besides, de construction has some special characteristics in legislative texts. Therefore, the investigation of de construction in legislative texts is of great significance. Firstly, we can sum up the use of de construction and explain it through describing its rules and counting its use frequency. Therefore, we can achieve a better understanding of its characteristics and functions in legislative texts. Secondly, former scholars explored de construction mainly in daily language and literature works. However, little attention is drawn to studying de construction in legislative texts. Therefore, the investigation of de construction in legislative texts can give us deep and different insight into its use in different register. This study has two purposes. On one hand, the study of de construction can give some useful guidance to the translation of the legislative texts. Nowadays, countries are communicating more frequently in many aspects. Better communication entails the understanding of the laws. As a result, more and more legislative texts are translated into English version. There are a large number of de constructions in Chinese legislative texts. It is necessary for us to gain a good understanding of de construction when processing the translation of Chinese legislative texts. On the other hand, according to previous studies, we can know that former scholars use different theories and perspectives to investigate de construction. And they have achieved fruitful results. The present study makes an attempt to use the corpus to explore the characteristics and functions of de construction in legislative texts.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Classification of De
This kind of classification has two types. The first one is the modified-head and the second one is mood auxiliary. Sun (1957), Ding (1961), Huang (1982) Lv (1982), Gao (1990), and Wang (1982) are the representatives who hold the view that de can be divided into two groups. Now Lv’s division of de is provided. He pointed out that de had two structures. The first structure is the modified-head, which is a relative word. For example, Through comparing the grammatical functions of “X (phrase)” and “X (phrase) + de”, Zhu (1961) divided de into three categories. According to different distribution of the structure (“X + de”), Zhu argued that de could be divided into three kinds: the adverbial marker, the nominal marker and the adjective marker. Zhu’s division can be explained in the following examples.Influenced by the structural linguistics, researchers in 1960s paid much attention to the function and distribution of de. Zhu’s classification brought out an impassioned discussion and laid the foundation for the following studies of de construction. Some scholars pointed out the trichotomy from other different perspectives. Xing (1996) claimed that de could be used as the auxiliary. In his opinion, de could be classified into three groups: structural auxiliary, tense-auxiliary and mood auxiliary. And Zhang (2000) held the similar classification with Xing’s. Xing’s division is presented in the following examples.
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2.2 Studies on De Construction
De construction has always been one of the most frequently discussed phrase structures in modern Chinese. As a result, the study of de construction attracts a lot of scholars’ attention to exploring it. From various perspectives and theories, researchers have achieved fruitful results. In the following part, the researches of de construction will be reviewed according to the research perspective and theories. From structural approach, there are two forms: “X + de + Y”, “X + de”. According to Bloomfield’s theory (1933), “X + de + Y” is regarded as the endocentric construction while “X + de” is analyzed as the exocentric construction. First, we will discuss “X + de + Y”. This construction includes three typical forms: In Zhu’s study, he denies the verb’s nominalization in the construction “NP + de + VP” and modifies Bloomfield’s endocentric theory. In his analysis, 石头房子 (stone house) is different from 石头的房子 (the house that is made of stone). The first structure is an endocentric construction which has only one head while the second one has two heads. From the semantic and syntactic perspective, Zhu (1984) adopted a double standard to identify the head of de construction. However, Si (2004) objected to Zhu’s view. And many researchers believe that separating the semantic head and the syntactic head is significant. We can use an example to illustrate it. Take the phrase 那种骄傲 (that kind of pride) as an example. From semantic perspective, 那种骄傲 (that kind of pride) actually is one kind pride, which makes the word 骄傲 become the semantic head. However, from the syntactic perspective, 那种 (that kind of) is a determiner that is the syntactic head.
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CHAPTER THREE RESEARCH DESIGN .... 19
3.1 RESEARCH QUESTION........... 19
3.2 RESEARCH METHOD...... 19
3.3 THE CORPUS IN THIS STUDY ...... 20
3.4 DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS ......... 21
CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION .... 25
4.1 STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS OF DE CONSTRUCTION IN LEGISLATIVE TEXTS ......... 25
4.2 SEMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF DE CONSTRUCTION IN LEGISLATIVE TEXTS ......... 29
4.3 PRAGMATIC FUNCTION OF DE CONSTRUCTION IN LEGISLATIVE TEXTS ..... 32
4.3.1 Classifying Function ....... 32
4.3.2 Function of Achieving Coherence ......... 33
4.3.3 Function of Making Hypothesis .... 33
4.3.4 Function of Expressing Vagueness ........ 34
4.4 IMPLICATIONS FOR THE TRANSLATION OF DE CONSTRUCTION ...... 36
CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION .......... 38
5.1 MAJOR FINDINGS .... 38
5.2 LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE STUDY ........ 39
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
This chapter discusses and analyzes the results and findings in an attempt to answer the research questions in chapter three. To be specific, part one starts with the structural characteristics of de construction in legislative texts. Part two deals with the semantic characteristics of this construction. Part three summarizes the pragmatic function of de construction. Part four presents some misuses of de construction in legislative texts. The implication for legal translation is provided in last part.
4.1 Structural Characteristics of De Construction in Legislative Texts
In this section, we discuss the structural characteristics of de construction from the following aspects: structural types of de construction, using coordinate structures (the coordinate phrases and the coordinate clauses) and owning the repetitive property. Li (2007) has studied structural types of de construction. In her analysis, the constituents before de can be nouns, adjective, and almost all kind of phrases. The present study discusses the structural types of de construction by referring to Li’s study. From analyzing de construction in the corpus, it is found that there are different structural types of de construction such as “prepositional phrase + de”, “verb-object phrase + de”, “subject-predicate phrase + de”, “S + V + O +de” and “compound sentence + de”. These types are presented in the following examples.
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Conclusion
In this chapter, the whole thesis will be summed up. The major findings which are analyzed in the above chapter are presented firstly. Then the limitations of this thesis and the suggestions for future researches will be presented. Based on the literature review, it is obvious that the previous researchers analyze de construction in daily language or literature works. However, there are few scholars who pay much attention to de construction which appears in legislative language. De construction is one of the most important sentence constructions in legislative language, which has some specific uses. The present author makes an attempt to investigate de construction in legislative texts. And this study aims to explore three aspects of de construction: the structural characteristics, the semantic characteristics and the pragmatic function. In this study, the corpus used is self-made. As we all know, China has many kinds of laws. It is impossible to adopt all the legislative texts as the research material. Based on the group sampling, 15 legislative texts are selected to make up the corpus. And the present author conducts the research by using the combination of descriptive and explanatory methods as well as the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Through the analysis, three major findings are as follows. Firstly, it is found that de construction has three structural characteristics in legislative texts. The first one is that de construction has different structural types: “prepositional phrase + de”, “verb-object phrase + de”, “subject-predicate phrase + de”, “S + V + O +de” and “compound sentence + de”. The second one is that de construction uses coordinate structures: the coordinate phrases and the coordinate clauses. The third one is that de construction uses the repetitive structure, which can be classified into two kinds: the repetitiveness of the formation and the repetitiveness of the whole construction.
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The reference (omitted)