Speech verbs’ typology and their translation in Chinese

Abstract

Speech event is not a simple “saying” event, and speech verbs are likely construed and translated differently and evaluatively. This paper argues that English and Chinese have different typologies of “saying” in terms of word forms. English speech verbs are comparatively highly lexicalized (for examples: declare, announce, scold, praise), but Chinese speech verbs are more grammaticalized than English, i.e. they are usually formed by a certain pre- adverbial modifier plus a core root “shuo (say)”. Because of the complexity of speech verb forms, a software called Words Location is designed to extract all speech verbs in a text and furthermore to group the speech verbs with their articulators, which directly and visually demonstrates their distribution and facilitates the evaluation of the accumulative evaluating effect of speech verbs and/or some hidden meaning and stance held by speakers in a text. The study offers a computeraided way of analyzing and translating speech verbs from English to Chinese consistently and scientifically.