A corpus study of a neglected Europeanized Chinese structure

Document Type

Presentation

Source Publication

The European Conference on Language Learning 2016

Publication Date

7-3-2016

Publisher

The International Academic Forum (IAFOR)

Abstract

Europeanization of the Chinese language has been a crucial but sometimes controversial topic in Chinese learning and translation training since the early twentieth century. This paper is aimed at throwing light on a neglected Europeanized syntactic feature to which attention has been hardly paid in academic discourse. With the aid of various online corpora such as those by the Center for Chinese Linguistics of the Peking University and Academia Sinica in Taiwan, it will be demonstrated that whilst Chinese connectives, for instance, ruguo-p-G (if), suiran --- M (although), to name but two, are now frequently or even habitually made the beginning of a sentence after the subject in written Chinese, they were traditionally placed after the subject in imperial Chinese texts V both literary and vernacular. I shall explain why it is plausibly the consequence of the Europeanization of the Chinese language. This study is not only significant to translation research, but also to the teaching of the Chinese language and English-Chinese translation training.

Language

English

Recommended Citation

Cheung, Y.-k. (2016, July). A corpus study of a neglected Europeanized Chinese structure. Paper presented at the European Conference on Language Learning 2016, Brighton, UK. Abstract retrieved from https://papers.iafor.org/submission30995/

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