Lengthening of sentences: modifying clauses with head nouns

of the novel ‗Dream of the Red Chamber‘. It is found that the instances of ‗shi + adjective predicate + (de)‘ mainly serve as emphasis marker, and almost all of them take the X-shi construction (namely, lexical internal element), e.g. 都是 doushi ‗all‘, 就是 jiushi ‗even if; exactly‘, 卻是 queshi ‗but‘.

Moreover, from the remaining examples in ‗Dream of the Red Chamber‘, the claim that shi as copula ‗be‘ as an Englishized structure is countered against, since those instances are neither for emphasis nor as X-shi construction, i.e. 不知是真是假 buzhi shi zhen shi jia ‗Don‘t know if it is true or false‘. Based on the literature, the sentence 不知是真是假 buzhi shi zhen shi jia ‗Don‘t know if it is true or false‘

should be a further Englishized pattern as it is even without de. However, since this example is found in ‗Dream of the Red Chamber‘, the suggestion of ‗shi + adjective + (de)‘ as Englishization may not be valid. Moreover, Payrube (1999) proposed that shi serving as copula ‗be‘ is a result of grammaticalization. Therefore, in the present study, the use of the copula shi ‗to be‘ will not be regarded as Englishization and further analyzed.

2.4.3 Lengthening of sentences: modifying clauses with head nouns

In English, the adjectival phrases or clauses can appear before or after the noun;

however, in traditional Chinese, the modifier always precedes the noun, and if the adjective is too long and complicated, then usually the whole sentence is divided into several short sentences (Hsu, 1994). While translating English modifying clauses into Chinese, people need to make adjustment and the resolution is to put the long clauses or phrases before the noun and mark it with the subordinating particle 的 de. Hsu (1994) observed that the translators make the following adjustments while translating English relative clauses: (1) move the relative clause before the head noun, (2) delete the relative pronoun or adverbial, and (3) add the subordinating marker de 的 after the

adjectival clauses. It is a new style affected by English and incorporated with Chinese

‗Those who believe that they‘ve never mixed their characters in their works are just the victims who are deceived by the wrongest imaginations.‘

(Wang 1947: 329)

‗Lin XX, who is 42 years old, graduated from the political school, obtaining first prizes of Chinese painting many times, has his unique view on descriptions of animals.‘ (Hsu 1994: 89)

‗I never forgive anyone who cites my words without getting my permission in advance.‘ (Yu 2006: 50)

‗That company doesn‘t respect the fact that Mr. Liu has had over thirty years‘

experiences in business.‘ (Yu 2006: 50)

The lengthening of Chinese sentences or pre-modifiers can be caused by an even

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more fundamental difference between Chinese and English (Pan, 1997; Wei, 2005). It is known that English is a hypotaxis language, i.e. the sentences are embedded with one and another, and connected with connectives. On the other hand, Chinese is a parataxis language, i.e. the arrangement of clauses is one after another without connectives showing the relation between them. Thus, English sentences can be very long and complicated with the embedding structure, while there is no such subordinating structure in Chinese, which makes traditional Chinese sentences much shorter. Nevertheless, due to the English influence, sentence subjects and objects are now often modified by long, embedded clauses marked with the subordinating particle 的 de.

However, though it is agreed that long pre-modifiers are a result of Englishization, the problem is the lack of objective and concrete criteria of judging long pre-modifiers in the literature. In other words, it is unclear how long the pre-modifier sould be for it to be taken as an Englishized structure.

A criterion is proposed by Lian (1993: 67), who defined a long pre-modifier as one containing two ‗a little bit long‘ phrases or clauses. Following Lian‘s criterion, He (2004) simply regarded two or more than two modifiers as long pre-modifiers, and applied this criterion to examine the newspaper articles in Mainland China in 1956, 1982 and 2000 respectively. The result showed that there are three tokens of long-premodifiers in 1956 data, but only one in the selected articles of 1982, and then in the data of 2000 there are eleven tokens. Though the difference between the results in 1956 and in 1982 is not significant enough, the occurrences of long pre-modifiers in 2000 data increase significantly comparing with the data in 1956 and 1982.

Therefore, the general tendency of lengthening of sentences is further supported by He (2004). She also counted the average words per sentence in her study. It is shown that the length of a sentence increases from 35 to 43 words per sentence from 1956

data to 1982 data, and then it increases to 51 words per sentence in 2000 data. Thus, it is revealed that the tendency of lengthening of sentences is more and more obvious.

Besides, she also pointed out that lengthening of sentences occurs more in the literary writing than the news report, which corresponds to Hsu‘s observations (1994); that is, long pre-modifiers are commonly used in newspaper and to a lesser degree, in magazines.

Noticeably, He (2004) observed that comparing the examples in 2000 with the cases in 1956 and 1982, the use of a series of short modifiers 的的不休 de de bu siou

‗de repeatedly occurs‘, mentioned by Yu (2006), decreased. It may reveal that long pre-modifiers are widely accepted and its structure is further nativized to avoid the repetition of de (He, 2004). In other words, the writers noticed that too many repetitions of de in a sentence is unnatural in Chinese, so they deleted the redundant use of de which is influenced by the translation of ‗of‘in English. This change implies that the use of long pre-modifiers is no longer restricted to the translation works but also natural writing.