Сравнение китайских и английских речевых связок в устных повествованиях

Conclusion

The backbone of a narrative resides in the narrative clauses (Labov and Waletzky 1967), i.e. clauses temporally or causally linked with each other. The comparison between the top five linkages in 20 English and 20 Chinese oral narratives on the same topic shows that about 66.9% of the linkages in English and about 75.4% of the linkages in Chinese reveal the temporal sequence of the events or scenes. In the further semantic function analysis of all the 1239 linkages cited in the 20 English texts and 436 linkages cited in the 20 Chinese texts reveals a similar result, more than 50% of the linkages used is temporal. The second frequently used linkages are causal ones, taking 15.1% in English and 22.4% in Chinese. The comparative study between the linkages in English and Chinese proves this linguistic universality of narratives well.

On the other hand, English and Chinese are very different languages, so surely there are differences between them. The majority of the linkages in both English and Chinese is conjunction, but there are conjunctions only found in English but not in Chinese, for example, the functional linkage that, which is used to introduce object or predictive clauses in traditional sense. Besides, there are categories of linkages which can only be found in one language but not in the other. To make a clause complex and more informative a clause can be used to modify a noun, or another clause both in English and Chinese, but the modifying clause is linked to the main clause in different ways. In English usually a formal linkage, i.e. a relative pronoun/adverb is used, while in Chinese no formal linkage is required. In Chinese locatives can be used as linkages to link the neighboring clauses and to show the temporal relation between them. In English the category which is closest to Chinese locative is preposition, though the two examples cited in the 20 Chinese texts 以后 yǐhòu (later; after), and 之后 zhīhòu (later; after) are generally post-positioned. Furthermore, the position of narrative linkages in a clause also reflects the the syntactic difference between English and Chinese. The word order of English is more rigid or fixed compared with that of Chinese. The narrative linkages in English are generally appear in the clause-initial position, no matter it is an inter-linkage, linking two or more independent clauses, or intra-clausal linkage, introducing a subordinate clause to a superodinate clause. While narrative linkages in Chinese can take a much freer position. In analyzing the relationship of the clauses in a Chinese text Li and Thompson (1981: 631-656) held that there are essentially two kinds of sentence linking in Chinese, forward linking and backward linking, based on the dependency between the neighboring clauses, which can be realized by forward-linking elements in clause-final position, adverbial forward-linking elements which may be movable or nonmovable elements that can be positioned after the topic/subject or in clause-initial position, perfective aspect, adverbial back-linking elements in clause-initial position, and nonmovable adverbs. As analyzed in the present study narrative linkages in Chinese may take a clause-initial, clause-middle, or clause-final position, and they can be classified into linkages in clause-final position and linkages in non-clause-final position.

The aims of the present research are to reveal the similarities and differences between English and Chinese linkages in oral narratives and to prove the universal properties and cultural specificity of narrative. The data used in the study can provide sufficient evidence to fulfill the first task, but as to the second task the data should be expanded to include more languages samples, so relevant studies are needed to further the present research.