本文来自Journal of Pragmatics第202卷的书评，作者王佳敏、姜峰。
In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in the contrastive analysis of linguistic, pragmatic and rhetorical language use between Chinese and English (Li and Xu, 2020; Liu et al., 2021; Loi and Evans, 2010; Scollon, 2000), which has spread across academic, political and journalist registers. Despite the profusion of empirical analyses, the interpretation of the identified differences in linguistic and pragmatic features seems cursory and thus incongruous across genres and contexts. For example, Li and Xu (2020) attributed the different use of textual metadiscourse in English and Chinese research articles to the respective “writer-responsible” and “reader-responsible” writing styles, but Scollon (2000) sees it “premature” to “begin to examine the rhetorical motivations” and then argues for seeking “cultural and cognitive motives for structural differences” (p. 764). Therefore, the book under review is a timely contribution, strongly proposing that English is a temporality-dominant language, whereas Chinese is relatively spatiality-dominant, and it draws on rich corpus data to demonstrate that this difference underlies many particularities in English and Chinese.
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There are 10 chapters grouped into five parts. Part I (chapters 1-2) elaborates on the theoretical position about the prominent temporality of English and the prominent spatiality of Chinese. Part II (chapters 3-5), Part III (chapters 6-8), and Part IV (chapter 9) illustrate with corpus data the spatial-temporal peculiarities of English and Chinese from lexical, syntactic, and textual levels respectively. With a focus on application, the last part (chapter 10) examines the English language learning of Chinese EFL learners from the perspective of English pro-temporality and Chinese pro-spatiality.
Chapter 1 discusses the difference in tense and aspect between English and Chinese. It is argued that predicate verbs are mandatory as the core of English sentences, but are not obligatory in Chinese, because the motion and internal temporal structure of an event are expressed, in many cases, by a nominal predicate. Therefore, English is characterized by verbs and temporality, but Chinese relatively by nouns, which denote objects and their forms in terms of spatiality (Wang and Liu, 2021). In chapter 2, the different preference for verbs and nouns is attributable to the linguistic roots of the two languages. Chinese words are primarily formed by nominal components, and even verbs are composed of nominal constituents, while English words are mainly derived from verbs (Adams, 2016). Therefore, the two languages tend to concentrate on space and time respectively.
In Part II, chapter 3 exemplifies the spatial-temporal difference between English and Chinese by contrasting the existential verbs be in English and you (“have”) in Chinese, both of which express the ontological meaning of “exist”. Derived from the PIE verbal root “bheue-” which means “to be, exist, grow”, be is temporal in nature, but you in Chinese is spatial because it is orthographically composed of two nominal characters “hand” and “meat”, so a spatial relationship between things is typically emphasized in Chinese. Chapter 4 contrasts English and Chinese writing systems, and shows that English is alphabetically spelled whereas Chinese is ideographically written. This difference substantiates the point that English is event-oriented and stresses temporality, while Chinese is relatively entity-centered and underlines spatiality. Chapter 5 illustrates the spatial peculiarity of Chinese by examining “adjective + verb” constructions in Chinese, and demonstrates that they mark the spatialization of events and actions which are often conceived of as three-dimensioned entities in Chinese representations.
In Part III, chapter 6 turns to the differences of the progressive aspect markers in grammaticalization between English and Chinese, and finds that with similar spatial sources, progressive aspect markers in the two languages have evolved into different grammatical structures. Chinese progressive aspect markers have a lower degree of grammaticalization than English, so often employ space to express time. Chapter 7 semiotically illustrates the spatial-temporal difference between English and Chinese. The syntactic representation of English is likened to Western music, which features continuity, connectedness and irreversibility and thus shows the particularity of pro-temporality. By contrast, the syntactic representation of Chinese resembles Chinese painting, and its discreteness, chunkiness, and reversibility suggest the pro-spatiality of Chinese. Chapter 8 analyzes Chinese frequently-used run-on sentences in terms of syntactic categorization, and argues that this type of sentences is a subcategory of complex sentences in Chinese, which embody the spatial traits of discreteness, chunkiness, and reversibility.
In chapter 9, the examination of English tense and its textual representations shows that English tense expresses rich time-relations and continuity in Narratives, anaphora in Descriptives and deixis in Reports, which embodies the tensed thought and temporality of English. In addition, the difference between English and Chinese textual structures is analyzed in terms of syntactic patterns, anaphora of topic chains and the progression of topics. This result indicates the continuity and connectedness in English in contrast to the discreteness and chunkiness in Chinese.
Chapter 10 explores the extent to which the spatial-temporal difference is interpretive of Chinese EFL learners’ learning of English. A corpus-based analysis of run-on sentences shows that Chinese EFL learners at different learning stages make frequent use of run-on sentences, and this is perhaps negatively transferred from their first language, since spatiality mandates a high frequency of run-on sentences in Chinese. The influence of Chinese spatiality can be also seen in the common use of the sprung type of coherence features in argumentative essays written by Chinese EFL learners. This is in stark contrast to the linear type which predominates in British students’ essays, and the difference points to the spatial-temporal preference by Chinese and English respectively.
As we have seen, all the chapters are well constructed to persuasively present the argument for the prominent temporality of English and the prominent spatiality of Chinese. This theoretical positioning underlies the fundamental difference between the two languages, and renders this book theoretically, methodologically and practically valuable. It makes a significant breakthrough in the contrastive analysis between English and Chinese, and helps to unpack the root causes of the differences suggested by previous studies, including hypotaxis and parataxis, analytic and holistic thinking (Scollon, 2000; Tyler, 1994). The book also sparks an interest in interdisciplinary research into linguistic and discoursal differences between English and Chinese. For example, neurolinguistic experiments can corroborate the spatial-temporal difference, since they have shown that the left hemisphere of the brain plays a greater role in processing alphabetic characters and temporal sequences, while the right hemisphere oversees the processing of Chinese characters and spatial transformations of visual information (Cohen et al., 2003; Gernsbacher and Kaschak, 2003). Last but not least, this book has pedagogical value, encouraging the application to second language learning of Chinese and English, especially in the teaching of translation and writing.
Nevertheless, this book needs to pay more attention to other Indo-European languages except English, despite observing that Indo-European languages are temporally oriented, with a vast majority of nouns derived from verbs or verbal roots. Overall, however, this book proposes and verifies the prominent temporality of English and the prominent spatiality of Chinese at different levels. Thus it is an essential reference book not only for those who work in the linguistic, pragmatic and psychological analysis of Chinese and English discourse, but also for students who are learning to make sense of cognitive and cultural differences between languages.
本文发表于Journal of Pragmatics 2022年第202卷第26-27页。感谢作者授权转载。由于篇幅所限，参考文献已省略。
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