A Corpus-Based Study of zunshou and Its English Equivalents

A Corpus-Based Study of zunshou and Its English Equivalents Ying Liu Department of Linguistics and Translation City University of Hong Kong Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong yliu227-c@my.cityu.edu.hk Abstract This paper describes a corpus-based contrastive study of collocation in English and Chinese. In light of the corpus-based approach to identify functionally equivalent units, the present paper attempts to identify the collocational translation equivalents of zunshou by using a parallel corpus and two comparable corpora. This study shows that more often than not, we can find in English more than one translation equivalents. By taking collocates into consideration, we are able to establish bilingual equivalence with more accuracy. The present study indicates that semantic preference and semantic prosody play a vital role in establishing equivalence between corresponding lexical sequences in English and Chinese. The studies of collocation across languages have potentially useful implications for foreign language teaching and learning, contrastive linguistic and translation studies, as well as bilingual lexicography. 1 Introduction The importance of the concept of collocation has long been recognized in theoretical linguistics. It was first put forward as an academic terminology by Firth (1957). Since then, there have been three major approaches to the study of collocation, which can be referred to as the semantic approach, the lexical approach (Halliday, 1966; Sinclair, 1966) and the integrated approach (Mitchell, 1971). Since the 1980s, the notion of collocation has been at the center of much corpus-linguistic work. The corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches have been widely adopted in the study of collocation. Although numerous studies of collocation based on corpus data have been conducted, the features of collocation have mainly been explored in monolingual context and there are comparatively fewer attempts to investigate collocation across different languages. The use of parallel corpora has greatly facilitated cross-linguistic research in recent decades and indeed, “they have been a principal reason for the revival of contrastive linguistics” (Salkie, 1999). As a tentative attempt, the present study focuses on investigating the cross-linguistic collocational equivalents of one verb – 遵守 zunshou using a bi- directional English-Chinese parallel corpus and two comparable corpora. A close observation of the right collocates of 遵守 zunshou and its English equivalents in terms of semantic preference and semantic prosody (Louw, 1993; Sinclair, 1996) have been made, with a view to determining the collocational translation equivalents in English and Chinese. In what follows, we will first describe the research method of the present study in Section 2, which includes the corpora to be used, the procedure for the identification of translation equivalents, the approaches and analytical concepts of collocation. Section 3 will present our corpus findings, followed by some discussions in Section 4. Section 5 will conclude this research with various implications and prospects for future work. 2 Research Method 2.1 Corpora The data analyzed in this study were obtained from one parallel corpus and two general corpora. The parallel corpus is the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Parallel Corpus (henceforth JDPC) (Wei and Lu, 2014). It is a 9-million bi-directional English-Chinese parallel …

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