A Comparative Analysis of the Semantic Meaning Patterns of ‘OR’ in Physics Texts in English and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

In terms of cross language comparisons, this study aims to explore the semantic meaning patterns of the logical connective ‘or’ between English and Mandarin Chinese. An ‘OR Corpus’ was constructed with the source of the texts drawn from Conceptual Physics and its Chinese translation. The texts include topics of motion and forces. The semantic meanings of related translations were mainly analyzed and categorized using Webster’s College Dictionary, Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary compiled by the Ministry of Education and the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. By looking into the free translations of ‘or’ in Mandarin Chinese and cases of translating ‘and’ into ‘huo’, seven meaning patterns of ‘huo’ (or) in Mandarin Chinese were identified. The free translations of ‘or’ and ‘and’ show that ‘huo’ encompasses ‘inclusive or’, ‘exclusive or’, ‘identity’, ‘all’, ‘enumeration’, ‘approximation’, and ‘addition’ meanings in Chinese. More importantly, the word ‘or’ by itself in English text does not quite express the meaning of addition. Besides, ‘or’ in English is not only translated directly into ‘huo’, but there are also 14 representative forms in Chinese to express various meanings of ‘or’ in English without the word ‘huo’. Accordingly, the implications of Chinese science text editing and science language teaching were discussed and suggested.

Keywords

• cross-language comparison
• science language
• science text
• semantic analysis