句首受事话题句及其英译

Clause-initial Patient Topic Clauses and Their English Translations

句首受事话题句形式多样。通过对《茶馆》和《狗儿爷涅槃》这两部话剧文本中115例句首受事话题句进行考察,结果显示,TV的频率远远高于TSV的频率,是典型句首受事话题句句式。对句首受事话题句的英译调查发现,将话题转换为宾语的SVO译句占语料的52.2%,是使用最多的译文形式。然而,从信息结构和话题的语篇功能来看,SVO并不能再现原文的多维度意义。

Clause-initial patient topic clauses are diverse in syntax.Based on an investigation of 115 such clauses collected from two drama texts Teahouse and Uncle Doggie's Nirvana,the present study reveals that the TV pattern occurs much more frequently than the TSV pattern.The TV pattern is hence the prototype in the corpus.When the English translations of the clauses are statistically probed into,SVO,in which O represents the original topic,turns out to be the most frequently adopted pattern,accounting for 52.2% of the data.However,SVO is found to ill-match the original as far as informational structure and discourse function of the topic are concerned.