Cohesive Repetition In Chinese And Its English Rendering-A Case Study Of Lao She's Mr. Ma & Son (二马) And Its English Version

Repetition can be both a rhetorical device and a lexical means for textual cohesion. It plays a very important role in textual coherence. Up to now, however, few studies have been exclusively made on repetition in terms of its cohesive function, still less research has been found that deals with repetition as a cohesive device in English and Chinese on a contrastive basis.This thesis first gives a definition for, and makes a classification of, cohesive repetition. Depending on the word class of the antecedent involved in repetition, cohesive repetition can be divided into nominal repetition, verbal repetition, clausal repetition and adjectival/adverbial repetition. Then by using the first three chapters of Lao She's Mr. Ma and Son and its English version as data, and approaching the problem from the perspective of the cohesive function of repetition, the thesis tries to sum up from the data all the major cases in which cohesive repetition is used in the Chinese original and how it is realized in the English translation, aiming to show in what contexts Chinese favors cohesive repetition while English prefers some other means to realize cohesion.If classified from some other perspectives, cohesive repetition can also distinguish between intra-sentential and supra-sentential repetition, structural and non-structural repetition, and co-referential and non-co-referential repetition. In view of the different characteristics of these perspectives, this thesis lays special emphasis on intra-sentential repetition, structural repetition and non-co-referential repetition. Regarding non-co-referential repetition, which is a special type of cohesive repetition, and which is very common in Chinese, a contrastive analysis is made between Chinese and English from 5 different angles. For structural repetition, the discussion is made from both rhetorical and non-rhetorical perspectives. As for intra-sentential repetition, a detailed discussion is made in particular on its use in Chinese and a contrastive study has also been conducted between Chinese and English.Our study shows that where cohesive repetition is used in Chinese, English may have it realized in the following forms: repetition, reference, substitution, ellipsis, and revision, and that in most cases, a more detailed analysis of the correspondence between the Chinese form and its English realizations is possible. Apart from linguistic heterogeneity and ways of expression peculiar to a given language, the application of cohesive repetition in a language is subject to many other factors such as the word class of the antecedent, the type of cohesive tie between the antecedent and the anaphoric item, the pragmatic functions of such cohesive ties, and the referents of the antecedent and the anaphoric item making up a repetition. Besides, its use will also be governed by some cohesive principles and anaphoric accessibility, by the style of the writer, and so on.It deserves to be mentioned here that by combining the findings of Halliday and Hasan (1976) and those of Zhang Delu (2003) on cohesive ties, the author proposes a new criterion for the classification of cohesive ties, taking into consideration the actual distance between the antecedent and the anaphoric item, and whether there are any relevant referring items in the interrupting sentence (s) between them; furthermore, by applying the criterion to its classification, the author divides repetition into 4 kinds, namely, immediate repetition, mediary repetition, remote repetition and mediated repetition, and explores the different cases in which they are used.