Discourse association pattern of English objects and its implications

Abstract
This thesis aims to establish a discourse association pattern of English objects through statistic analysis of data collected from spoken English. The pattern is then compared with the associated pattern of Chinese clause-initial patient topics. Since scholars have different opinions of the position of the topic part of English translations, I hope that the findings can provide useful and reliable evidence in this aspect.
The author of this thesis checks the relevant literature review home and abroad, collects the oral language material to calculate and analyze, in order to discuss the manners and positions of the distributions of discourse chunks, compare the discourse associations between Chinese and English and find the similarities and differences of these two kinds. One of the similarity is that the closer the sentence is to the topic, the higher the frequency of discourse association is. And the biggest difference is that the function of continuation is more obvious in Chinese, but the function of import is more influential in English. On the basis of this, this essay turns to the methods of translating clause-initial patient topic sentences, respectively using TSV and TV structures as typical examples. At last, this essay will analyze the translations again to find whether the translations can reproduce the multi-dimensional significance of the origins.
Keywords：English objects, clause-initial patient topics, discourse association, translation
Contents
摘要    I
Abstract    II
Contents    III
Chapter 1 Introduction    1
1.1 Aim of the essay    1
1.2 Organization of the essay    1
Chapter 2 Literature Review    1
2.1 Clause-initial patient topics    1
2.2 English SVO as usual translation of clause-initial patient topics    2
Chapter 3 Research Methodology    3
Chapter 4 Discourse association pattern of English objects    3
4.1 Definition of discourse association    3
4.2 Treatment of the English data    4
4.2.1 Analysis of the manners of discourse associations    4
4.2.2 Analysis of the distributions of associations    4
4.3 A comparison between English objects and Chinese topics    6
4.3.1 Difference in association pattern    6
4.3.2 Changes of discoursal function of translations    7
Chapter 5 Conclusion    9
Bibliography    10