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 functions such as “disposition”, “topic/comment” and “causation”.

[Key words] Ba-VP construction translation Chinese to English

1. The rationale of the research

The 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 framework

The 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 shows that the coat is disposed by the action of putting off.