A Typological Investigation of English and Chinese Corrective Markers

Corrections constitute a universal semantic category among all languages in the world, and they are reflected in different forms of expression in Chinese and English. This paper systematically discusses the parallel forms in both Chinese and English based on the Chinese-English parallel corpora in translation. In the meantime, the paper discusses the semantic corrective meaning and the pragmatic corrective meaning, as well as the counter-expectation features and the discourse marker functions of Chinese and English corrective markers. It carries out a typological study of the corrective markers of the typical contrastive negation structure and finds out the entailment principles among corrective, adversative, additive, and contrastive markers. The systematic study may contribute to second language acquisition, translation studies, and explorations of common rules of human languages.