Now and xianzai: A contrastive study of two deictic adverbs

Abstract

The present study looks at the deictic adverbs now and 現在 ( xianzai ) and examines their respective roles in English and Chinese. Now and xianzai are commonly considered to be semantically equivalent. Their primary value is temporal: both now and xianzai refer to the time of utterance, or more generally to a temporal interval which includes the time of utterance. By examining a parallel corpus of Taiwanese and English novels, this paper aims to show that apart from this present-reference value, now and xianzai have little in common. The analysis of aligned texts reveals that: ( 1 ) now is more frequent than xianzai; ( 2 ) there is an asymmetry in the temporal use of both markers. Following Wang (2001) , I argue that now has a wider semantic range than xianzai : whereas now might be used pragmatically ( Now, why on earth did she leave at such a time? ), xianzai is limited to strict temporal reference. It appears that even in its temporal use, now is more complex than xianzai ; now is quasi-systematically contrastive, whereas xianzai tends to be purely deictic. We conclude that now is closer in function to the Chinese particle le than to the adverb xianzai .