A Contrastive Study of the Transitivity in English and Chinese Argument-Oriented Adverbial Sentences
Research on transitivity has primarily focused on the impact of major syntactic components such as subject,predicate,and object on transitivity,with little in-depth attention paid to the role of modifiers.Grounded on the cognitive model of transitivity,this study takes for example the co-occurrence of two basic verbs EAT and"chi"(吃,eat)with argument-oriented adverbials(AOAs)in English and Chinese respectively,aiming to contrast the transitivity of the AOA sentences between the two languages.It is found that(1)the AOAs in English usually occur in the sentence-final position and with lower frequency,thereby exerting a less negative impact on the transitivity of the sentence compared to their Chinese counterparts;and(2)the AOAs in Chinese primarily appear between the subject and the predicate verb in a sentence and with much higher frequency,thus inducing significantly greater attrition on the transitivity of the sentence than those in English.This article proposes that the disparate effects of English and Chinese AOAs on sentence transitivity stem from the distinct spatio-temporal preferences of these two languages,i.e.,English favors a strong temporal mindset,while Chinese prefers a strong spatial mindset.
argument-oriented adverbialstransitivityEATchi(吃,eat)pro-temporality and pro-spatiality
万方数据
维普
