Abstract: Drawing on Hoey’s (2005) Theory of Lexical Priming, the paper investigates the frequencies, the collocation and colligation patterns of the English phrase “more and more” as shown in the three corpora, namely, PCCE, BNC and CLEC.It is found that a lot of the differences as revealed in the comparative results are due to the priming effects from different linguistic environments, including native vs. non-native language contexts and bilingual vs. monolingual contexts. The source text and the native-language transfer are in particular two factors that impact the above phrasal priming. It is believed that the lexical priming theory, with its distinctly psychological perspectives, can help to shed new light on the issue of “equivalence” in translation by highlighting the fact that some of the so-called apparent English and Chinese equivalents cannot be equivalently primed in syntactic positions, collocations, pragmatic associations etc. even though they might be semantically equivalent. These can probably be the de facto factors that underlie translations that are correct in terms of denotation, but not necessarily with the same or similar naturalness or style as that of the original. The study concludes by pointing out that the lexical priming theory not only can guide English to Chinese translation practice directly, but also can offer new theoretical grounds to the contrastive study between English and Chinese as an academic discipline.

Keywords: more and more; lexical priming theory; parallel corpus; equivalence; contrast between English and Chinese

摘要： 本研究根据Michael Hoey提出的词汇触发理论，分别考察了英文短语“more and more”在香港理工大学汉英当代文本平行语料库（PCCE）、英国国家语料库（BNC）和中国英语学习者语料库（CLEC）中的频率、类连接形式与搭配形式。研究发现，母语环境和非母语环境、双语转换环境和语言直接使用环境下的“more and more”触发模式均有各自的特征，源语文本和母语迁移对触发亦有明显的影响作用。本文认为，词汇触发理论能让我们从心理学的角度，重新审视翻译中原文与译文的“对等”关系问题，揭示出某些中、英文词汇即便是语义上完全对等，但由于文化差异等原因，经它们触发的在原文和译文句子中的位置、搭配、语用联想等方面却未必完全一样。这正是原文与译文在行文及风格上不一致的深层原因。因此，词汇触发理论不仅对英汉翻译具有实际指导意义，还提供了英汉对比研究的理论新视角，值得我们重视。

关键词: more and more, 词汇触发理论, 平行语料库, 对等, 英汉比较