The Chines BA-VP Structure and its English Translation

The Chines BA-VP Structure and its English Translation [Abstract] The Ba-construction is a basic syntactic pattern in modern Chinese, and it is often regarded as one of its characteristic grammatical phenomena. This thesis demonstrates the Ba-VP sentences in details and introduces some suggestive methods to translate the Ba-VP sentences. In English there is no equivalent Ba-VP sentence pattern, thus, when translating Chines Ba-VP sentences into English, we should translate them according to their semantic f unctions such as “disposition”, “topic/comment” and “causation”.[Key words] Ba-VP construction translation Chinese to English1. The rationale of the researchThe Ba-construction is a basic syntactic pattern in modern Chinese. It has quite a lot variants. The BA-VP structure is one them. As a grammatical phenomenon characteristic of Chinese, it has attracted much attention from Chinese grammarians both at home and abroad. Throughout the history of the studies on the Ba-construction, its syntactic structure has been the focus. Though achievements have been made, some problems have still remained unsolved, for the studies have mainly kept on the surface syntactic structure with a neglect of the semantic basis in its deep structure. So, currently, a tendency is shown that the research focus has been turned from syntactic studies to semantic studies in grammatical analysis. Against this background, the semantic structure of the Ba-construction has attracted more and more attention from scholars both at home and abroad.While the Ba-construction has been a hot topic during the history of modern Chinese grammatical studies, it is barely discussed from the perspective of contrastive linguistics. And we will mainly discuss the English realization of Ba-VP sentences.2.The different concepts of semantic relations in A-BA-B-C frameworkThe normal sentence order in Modern Chinese is S-V-O. But with the use of preposition BA in the sentence, the order can be changed into S-BA-O-V. Why is the change of sentence order acceptable with the use of BA? And in what case may or may not the preposition BA be used to form a BA-VP sentence? In order to answer these questions, grammarians have given some different planations, including the concepts of “disposition”, “causation” and“comment”.2.1 The concept of “disposition”From the perspective of semantics, Wang Li proposed the idea of “disposition”. Wang Li described what is meant by sentences in the disposal form as follows: The disposal form states how a person is handled，manipulated，or dealt with, how something is disposed of or how an affair is conducted. Since it is specially intended for disposing，the disposal form cannot be used unless the action possesses the quality of disposing(Wang Li 1947:160-161)．This simply means that the NP after BA is the object which can be disposed by the action of the verb in the BA-VP structure, for instance, 把衣服脱了. 衣服（coat）in this structure is the object of the verb 脱（put off）. The action putting off acts directly on the coat, so when the action terminates there must be a result that the coat is no longer wearing. The result showsthat the coat is disposed by the action of putting off.Wang Li also finds that the BA-VP structure does not always express disposing; it can be used as well to show an occurrence which is often an unhappy effect of another，or an involuntary happening, for example, (a)小红听了，不觉把脸一红(Xiao Hong’s face turn red because she heard something)；(b)把牙磕了(My teeth were cracked)．In (a) face turning red is the effect of hearing something. (b) shows that an involuntary happening( who is willing to crack his own teeth?) About the disposal concept of Ba-construction we think Song Yuzhu’s conclusion is more comprehensive. He (1981) said: “The action represented by the predicate verb in the sentence brings about a certain influence on the object introduced by the Ba-construction, so that the affected object tends to have some sort of change, resulting in a certain state. Therefore, disposal concept refers to the relation between the verb and the affected element rather than an intended action of the person or thing represented by the subject.”2.2 The concept of topic/commentXue Fengsheng(1987) is one of those who actively seek a unified grammatical meaning expressed by the Ba-construction. He describes the Ba-construction in an abstract formula：A把B+C，in which A and B refer to nominal elements，and C is always a descriptive statement. He points out that the most prominent semantic feature of the Ba-construction may lie in such a restraint：C in the previous formula must be a descriptive statement about B’s condition as a result of a certain action．The term “descriptive statement” does not simply refer to an adjective or a modifier, but a statement，which functions as predication of a sentence，describing the state or situation of B at a particular moment，rather than describing the action or the process in which B is dealt with．Having defined the nature of C，Xue continues to make clear the nature of B．His viewpoint is that syntactically B is the subject of the predication C，and at the same time B is the main topic of the entire sentence．This point is opposite to that of others who think B only functions as the preposed object of the verb in the entire Ba-construction．As he regards B as the main topic of the complete construction and C as a statement or comment，we can term his approach as the ‘topic-comment’analysis of the Ba-construction．The significance of the analysis lies in its comprehensiveness，for it can account for those sentences which cannot be explained by the disposal analysis．2.3 The concept of causationYe Xiangyang (2004) and Hu Wenze (2005) point out that the grammatical meaning of the construction is causative, because they believe that the disposal analysis originally cannot account for all kinds of Ba-construction，and that the topic-comment analysis is not able to prompt the semantic feature of the Ba-construction．In a word，they believe that in the framework of A把B+C，there exist two events which have the causal relation between them semantically，and that formally，the causing event must be expressed explicitly by words，while the caused event can be implied without being expressed by concrete syntactic components．3. Some thoughts on translating BA-VP structureAfter the above analysis of the relationships between the noun after BA and the verb in BA-VP structure, we will discuss how to translate Chines BA-VP structuresinto English with some examples in this part.Generally speaking, in English we cannot find an equivalent sentence structure to the Chines BA-VP structure. Therefore, when we want to put the Chines BA-VP structure into English we have find the similar sentence patterns in English to realize the translation. According to English grammar(Zheng Houyao, 2005), English sentences fall into the following patterns:A. SV, e.g. The sun rises.B. SVC, e.g. The sun is red. The cake tastes delicious.C. SVO, e.g. Tom made a hole in the wall.D. SVOO, e.g. He brings me cookies every day.E. SVOC, e.g. The sun keeps us warm.F. There Be Pattern, e.g. There stands a hill in the middle of the park.According to our analysis of BA-VP structure, the most frequently used sentence pattern is S-Ba-O-V. Compared with the English sentence patterns, the Chines BA-VP sentence pattern may be similar to the English sentence Patterns C and E in that there are the elements of V and O in them. This means that when the noun after BA is the object of the verb in BA-VP structure, it is always safe for us to use the English sentence pattern C or E for translation. For example,(1) 她把头扭了两扭，斜着眼睛，扑嗤一笑。