意象、文化与翻译一从文化语言学角度对.txt

toward a theory of cultural linguistics(1996) imagery,cultureand translation-a comparative study on the english versions oftang poetry through cuijural linguistics60 pageszhang wenmay,2004in his book toward a theory of cultural linguistics(1996)gary palmerapplied cognitive linguistics directly to three traditional approaches thatare central to linguistic anthropologyboasian linguistics.ethnosemanticsand the ethnography of speakingand he named this synthesis culturallinguisticspalmer proposed cultural linguistics as a new approach towardsthe way language worksthe most distinguished featureof this approach isthat it lays emphasis on imagery againimagery refers not only to visualimagesbut also images we get from all our perceptual organsit is a complexcognitive itemwhich includes specific images as well as other relevant butmore dbsact cognitive concepts such as schema and scriptetccultural linguisticsby its very essenceis a theory of mental imageryitseeks to understand how speakers deploy speech and listeners understand itthrough kinds of imageryit takes that language is the play of verbal lymbolsthat are based in imagery which is virtually structured by cultureimagerylanguageculture and their relations form the core of cultural linguisticsthe fact that poetry is creative of images and the notable differencesbetween chinese and english culture add great significance to the comparativestudy of the imageryof tang poetry and its english versionsthis dissertationmakes a tentative research on the application of cultural linguistics to thecomparative study of tang poetry and its english versionshoping it will beconstructive on the translation of tang poetry and the appreciation of itsenglish versionskey wordsimagery culture language tang poetry and its english versions imagery,culture and translationicontentensacknowledgementenglish abstractchinese abstract1 introduction.11.1 purpose of the dissertation11.2 organization of the dissertation.22 previous research relative to culturallinguistics32.1 linguistic anthropology and its three major approaches.32.1.1 boasian tradition.32.1.2 cognitive anthropology.62.1.3 ethnography of speaking.82.2 cognitive linguistics92.3 imagery in cultural linguistics112.3.1 images122.3.2 schema.152.3.3 script and scenario172.4 relationship between imagery,culture and language.192.4.1 culture and language192.4.2 imagery,culture and language.253 significance of applying imagery to thecomparative study of tang poetry and its englishversions.303.1 cultural disparities and imagery313.1.1 comparative study of chinese culture and english culture.31 imagery,culture and translationii3.1.2 cultural disparities reflected on imagery.343.2 influence of musical feature of poetry on imagery.364 critical analysis of imagery in the translationoftang poetry and the implications.404.1 images of similar cultural information414.2 images of different cultural information.454.2.1 images as a whole reflecting different cultural information454.2.2 minor images reflecting different cultural information475 conclusion50note.52reference54 imagery,culture and translation31 introduction1.1 purpose of the dissertationthe tang dynasty was the golden age of chinese poetry.in the number of poemsand variety of forms,in the beauty of imagery and broadness of themes,tang poetrysurpassed that of all ages before it.there are at least two reasons for the blossoming oftang poetry.one is that chinese poetry has a very long history.the first collection offolk songs and poems,the book of songs,was compiled before confuciustime.fromthe western zhou to the sui dynasty,chinese poetry had been developing and hadbecome rich in content and form.the other is social reason.tang tai zong was one ofthe wisest emperors that ruled china.the 130 years from his time to the time of tangxuan zong was the heyday not only of the tang dynasty,but also of the whole feudalperiod of china.china was then the largest and strongest country in the world;it wasalso economically and culturally the most advanced.tang poetry is indeed aninexhaustible treasury.in every sense it is the peak of chinese poetry.many scholars,both chinese and foreigners,have contributed themselves intothe translation of this incomparable heritage of the chinese people.based on thesetranslations,efforts have been done in the comparative study of tang poetry and itsenglish versions.imagery-rendering is part of the comparative studies.a deficiency inthe previous studies of imagery-rendering is that they are not theoreticallywell-founded,so they appear to be a little superficial.palmer discussed the relationship among imagery,language and culture in thetheory of cultural linguistics.with the application of the relationship of the three,thispaper tries to make a further study of imagery-rendering in the translation of tangpoetry,and divide the imagery into different categories according to its relationshipwith the cultural information it reflects.hopefully,the application of the relationship imagery,culture and translation4between imagery and culture in the translation of tang poetry will be helpful in theimage rendering and the appreciation of the english versions of tang poetry.thefollowings are questions need be solved before we reach the last conclusion.a what is imagery,and what is its relationship with language and culture?b what is the significance to apply imagery in the comparative study of tangpoetry and its english version?c in imagery-rendering,what should the translator be most clear about?1.2 organization of the dissertationthis dissertation is composed of five chapters.chapter 1 serves as an introduction to this dissertation,and specifies the purposesof the dissertation.chapter 2 consists of three parts.the first part is literature review of culturallinguistics.the second part is introduction of some basic concepts such as imagery,image and schema,etcin the last part,first of all,there is a review of the relationshipof language and culture,and then is a discussion of the relationship of imagery,language,and culture.in the first part of chapter 3,we talk about the significance of applying imagery tothe comparative study of tang poetry and its english versions.imagery is virtuallystructured by culture,so in the following part,there is a general comparison of thechinese and english culture,and illustrates with examples how the cultural disparity isreflected in imagery.imagery includes visual image as well as auditory image,somusical feature of poetry is also an important device in creating images.the last partof this chapter is about the function of musical feature in creating poetic images.chapter 4 concerns itself about with the comparative study aboutimagery-rendering in translating tang poetry into english versions by the culturalapproach,and proposes basic categories of imagery in tang poetry.chapter 5 is the last chapter.it is a concluding part,in which we summarize whatwe have investigated in the previous chapters,and also attempt to describe what islikely to be done in the future in the research field of cultural linguistics. imagery,culture and translation52 previous research relative to culturallinguistics2.1 linguistic anthropology and its three major approacheslinguistic anthropology is a sub-field of linguistics,which focuses on the place oflanguage in its wider social and cultural context,and its role in forging and sustainingcultural practices and social structures.linguistic anthropology views language mainlyfrom the cultural dimension,seeking to understand language in cultural background.boasian linguistics,cognitive anthropology and ethnography of speaking areconsidered as three traditions drawn upon by linguistic anthropology(palmer 1996).2.1.1 boasian traditionthe boasian tradition is an american school of linguistic anthropology,whichflourished during the first half of the twentieth century.its theoretical axiom lies at theprinciple of linguistic relativity.franz boas,from whom the boasian tradition derived its name,was born andtrained in germany,and later he imported the german intellectual tradition of johannherder1and wilhelm von humboldt2.boasattention was primarily focused on the classificatory function of language.allspeeches are based on the classification of experience.but these classifications vary imagery,culture and translation6dramatically across languages.boas believed that the differences among linguisticclassification are not caused by individualsabilities of various cultures.as ananti-racist,he insisted that no one race is inferior to others in the world,so is theirculture,and all languages in spite of their formal differences are equally efficient toexpress their own culture.following humboldts idea of language,boas further developed that in eachlanguage,only a part of the complete thought we have in mind is expressed.that is tosay each language has a tendency to select only some of the individual concepts in thewhole idea for expression.it will be recognized that in each language only a part ofthe complete concept that we have in mind is expressed,and that each language has apeculiar tendency to select this or that aspect of the mental image which is conveyed bythe expression of the thought(1966:39).and this tendency is decided by variouscultural interests.so one feature of boasian approach is that grammars of languagesshould be described in their own terms rather than in terms of categories previouslydeveloped for the study of indo-european languages.though boas hold that linguistic categories may express(at least partially)thoseof thinking,and they do not determine thought,in later years,he also considered thepossibility that linguistic categories might impose themselves on the thought of theirspeakers.his student edward sapir who was probably the most brilliant american linguistof the twentieth century closely followed boasdoctrine of physic unity.sapir also emphasized that the diversity of each language,which is a formallycomplete system,makes languages incommensurate with each other to some degree(sapir 1964:128).despite of the incommensurate feature of languages,sapir believedthat the communication between people of different languages is still possible becauseof the physic unity of humanity.(sapir 1949:97-507) imagery,culture and translation7sapir further developed boaslinguistic relativity.but opposite to boas whobelieved that language reflects only part of the complete thought of mind,sapir heldthat the potential of thought can be fully unfolded only in language and true conceptualthinking is impossible without language because it is symbolically mediated.alsosapir held that different languages must channel conceptual thinking in different waysbecause grammatical categories vary across languages,resulting in mutualincommensurability.the relativity here refers to the pattern of thinking rather than theprocess of thinking,which is part of the psychic unity of humanity.benjamin lee whorf,although a self-learn linguist,had done a distinguishedcontribution to the boasian approach.like boas and sapir,whorf also insisted on the psychic unity of humanity:there is a universal,gefuhl-type way of linking experiences,which shows up inlaboratory experiments and appears to be independent of languagebasically alike forall persons.(whorf 1956:267)much of whorfs thought was directly inspired by sapir,like whom,whorfbelieved that thought is linguistically mediated:thinking.contains a large linguisticelement of a strictly patterned nature.(whorf 1956:66),and also whorf seemed tosupport thechannelfunction of language upon thought.we can see this point in thefollowing statement about thelinguistic relativity principle(whorf 1956:221):thelinguistic relativity principle.means,in informal terms,that usersof markedly different grammars are pointed by the grammars towarddifferent types of observations and different evaluations of externallysimilar acts of observation,and hence are not equivalent as observersbut must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.the death of boas,sapir and whorf in successive five years together with thedisruption of world warled to the declined of the boasian tradition.starting from the imagery,culture and translation81950s,some linguists of american linguistic anthropology drew their attention back tothe principle of linguistic relativity.among these linguistics,lucy was one of themost distinguished figures.following the linguists of 1950s1960s,whoreformulated the principle of linguistic relativity as a hypothesis,which needed to betested by experimental methods,involving the usual understanding in terms ofdependent and independent variables which are never found in whorfs corpus,his(1992 a)contrastive study of the grammatical category of number in english andyucatec maya,a language of mexico confirmed the hypothesis that language hasdetectable effects in thought.the boasian tradition,inaugurated by boas and carried on by sapir and whorf,isintimately associated with the principle of linguistic relativity,the idea that speakersof different languages are led by different systems of grammatical categories todiffering construals of experience of the world.after a hiatus of some 40 years,lucystwo volumes herald a revival of interest in the boasian perspective.2.1.2 cognitive anthropologycognitive anthropology,an american bred school of structural anthropologyemerged during the 1960s.the first generation of cognitive anthropology is calledethnosemantics,which is predicated upon the hypotheses that cultural difference is tobe captured in terms of the taxonomic categorizations of specific cognitive domainssuch as kinship and color,which are shared by individual members of a given culture,but not necessarily by members of other cultures.the main formal logical methodsadopted by cognitive anthropologists in their analysis of cultural domains are those ofstructural linguistics.a basic assumption of cognitive anthropology is that culture is a mental imagery,culture and translation9phenomenon,cognitive organizations of material phenomena.(tyler 1969a:3)aculture,as a mental system,generates all and only the proper cultural behavior.aculture consists of a set of logical principles which order relevant material phenomena.to the cognitive anthropologist these logical principles rather than the materialphenomena are the object of investigation.(tyler 1969a:14)so in the cognitiveanthropologists eyes,culture is analog of the linguists notion of grammar.thus,through the analysis of grammar,the cognitive anthropologists purpose is to find outprinciples underlying the organization of culture in mind.cognitive anthropology primarily focused on semantic analysis,mainly in thethree types:componential analysis,taxonomy and partonomy.a componential analysis is to collect all the words in the native language denotingvarious categories within a particular semantic domain.then all the words in the samesemantic domain will be analyzed semantically into their meaning components,whichcan also be called semantic features.all terms with same features are assigned thesame position in the matrix,resulting in a paradigm.(tyler 1969b:1-27)the purpose of this type of structuralist semantic analysis is to reveal thecognitive organization of this domain.a componential analysis deals with the relationship of contrast,as english shecontrasts with he in the semantic feature of sex.taxonomy deals with another type of semantic relationship which is also one ofthe cognitive anthologists interestthe hierarchical relationships of inclusion,fromthe most inclusive to the least inclusive.the meanings of more specific terms areincluded within the meanings of higher level terms when they are hierarchicallyrelated.partonomy deals with the part-whole relationship.it may sound a little similarwith taxonomy.the main difference of these two types of cognitive organization lies in imagery,culture and translation10that taxonomy is an arrangement of terms about kind ofa pekinese is a kind of dog,while partonomy is based on the notion of part ofthe hand is part of the arm.through the comparative study of the terms and expressions of particularsemantic domains in natural language,the cognitive anthropologist tries to discovergeneral psychological processes employed by the innate central processing mechanismof the human mind in generating these cultural systems.cognitive anthropology is todiscover how different peoples organize and usetheir culturesand search forthe organizing principles underlying behavior(tyler1969b:3).focusing primarily on analyzing atomistic features of meaning throughcomponential analysis or taxonomy or partonomy,cognitive anthropology hardlyadopted any theory of imagery in its study,though it was driven by a strong interest incognition.2.1.3 ethnography of speakingethnography of speaking was first presented in a series of influential articles ofhymes in 1960s and 1970s.sapir-whorfs principle of linguistic relativity supposed that a language was aconstraining channel through which its speakers construe experience.in hymessopinion,this statement presupposes communicative relativity,as hymes put it in thefollowing