A Contrastive Study Of Reference Cohesion In A Dream Of Red Mansions

For a long time, sentence is thought of as the largest unit of language. Until the 1970s, after the publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 and the cohesion theory was set up, the study on the level of text (discourse), especially the study of cohesion and coherence had received more and more attention from linguists.In the latest two decades, the contrastive analysis in Chinese linguistics develops very fast, with thousands of articles focusing on the discussion of cohesion and coherence of text. But only few articles concern with each single cohesion device in particular, especially the relatively more important and wide-spread——reference. Let alone the study of the references in Chinese classic literary works. By scanning all the articles in the data base, I find that there is still no one attempt to analyze the characteristics in the use of reference cohesion in Chinese classic literary work. To fill this blank, this thesis devotes to the analysis of the reference cohesion, taking one of the Chinese classic literary works A Dream of Red Mansion as an example.This thesis applies Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory which is an authoritative as well as practical. By employing the contrastive approach, this thesis explores the similarities and differences in use of reference between the Chinese version of A Dream in Red Mansion and its English translation. It makes a detailed analysis of the important cohesion device"reference"adopted in the two versions by quoting large number of examples in the text. Then based on the scientific analysis, certain conclusions about the similarities and differences on the characteristics in employing references finally are drawn.This thesis is made up of four chapters. In chapter one the author states the purpose and significance of this study. In chapter two, the author of this thesis introduces Halliday and Hasan's theory as the framework, which consists of three parts: personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference. Since this thesis is a contrastive study, involveing lots of Chinese passages, the author also employs Hu Zhuanglin's theory as a complementary one. Hu has been researching the cohesion and coherence characteristics of Chinese for decades and his theory is authoritative and widely accepted. Then in Chapter Three, which is the body of the thesis, qualitative research and quantitative analysis are made on the basis of large numbers of examples. The analysis also falls into three parts. In the first part, study of the similarities and differences of personal reference, I discover that the most striking feature in Chinese is the frequent use of zero anaphora while English features with the high frequency of the third person pronoun to achieve the cohesion effect. In the second parts, the characteristics of demonstrative references are discussed. It is clear that the frequency of use of that is much higher than this in English, while"那"lower than"这". Besides, many other characteristics in Chinese reference of this type are analyzed in detail herein. The third part devotes to the discussion of comparative references. The conclusion runs as follows: English and Chinese are similar in general comparison in that both languages share many lexical words with comparison meaning. But in terms of particular comparison, in English, it is achieved through the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs, apart from lexical and structure means. Whereas comparative reference in Chinese is realized through some structures combined with lexical means. Since we don't have the inflective form"er",All in all, this thesis is an effective attempt of a contrastive analysis of Chinese classic literary works from the functional approach.