Now and xianzai
A contrastive study of two deictic adverbs
The present study looks at the deictic adverbs
now and 現在 (
xianzai) and examines their respective roles in English and Chinese.
Now and
xianzai are commonly considered to be semantically equivalent. Their primary value is temporal: both
now and
xianzai refer to the time of utterance, or more generally to a temporal interval which includes the time of utterance. By examining a parallel corpus of Taiwanese and English novels, this paper aims to show that apart from this present-reference value,
now and
xianzai have little in common. The analysis of aligned texts reveals that: (
1)
now is more frequent than
xianzai; (
2) there is an asymmetry in the temporal use of both markers. Following
Wang (2001), I argue that
now has a wider semantic range than
xianzai: whereas
now might be used pragmatically (
Now, why on earth did she leave at such a time?),
xianzai is limited to strict temporal reference. It appears that even in its temporal use,
now is more complex than
xianzai;
now is quasi-systematically contrastive, whereas
xianzai tends to be purely deictic. We conclude that
now is closer in function to the Chinese particle
le than to the adverb
xianzai.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Material and Method
- 3.Literature review
- 4.Distribution of now and xianzai: data description
- 4.1
Frequency of now and xianzai
- 4.2
Correspondence pattern of now and xianzai
- 4.3
Non-Correspondence pattern of now and xianzai
- 5.Analysis of the data
- 5.1Hypotheses
- 5.2
Now / xianzai: Situational use vs. contrastive use
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
This article is currently available as a sample article.
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