Abstract
Abstract As there is no relative pronoun in Chinese, paralleling relative clauses in Chinese sentences represents a significant challenge for Chinese translators of Pāli Buddhist texts. The main issues raised in this dissertation are the syntactic relativization strategies and discourse structures of relative clauses in the Majjhima-Nikāya and its Chinese parallels. The aim of this comparative study is twofold: to illustrate how translators rendered relative clauses into Chinese sentences and to investigate translation methods and grammatical variations in Chinese parallels. Due to the fact that Pāli and Chinese are two dissimilar languages, the present research approach problems from three aspects: (1) A syntactic and semantic description of Pāli relative constructions based on the typological hypothesis; (2) An exposition of the syntactic hierarchy of Pāli sentences and their corresponding Chinese translations; (3) A comparison of the Pāli relative constructions in various Chinese translations according to Old Chinese grammar. In the light of the analysis of demonstrated examples, the results reveal that relative clauses in the Majjhima-Nikāya involves two major types: correlative and post-head construction. The critical factor affecting the Chinese parallels is syntactical loan, especially in word-order reproduction. Another significant feature is that Chinese translations not only integrate multiple Old Chinese topic structures, but also generate the information structure changes of certain clause-complexes. Many studies show that relativization seems to exhibit a close relation to the process of topicalization in Chinese; however, this can explains only some part of Chinese relative constructions. The key factor is that in spite of some similarities, there exist differences in the information structures between the Pāli texts and Chinese translations.