A Contrastive Study Of Cohesion In English And Chinese Short Stories

Using the theories and methodology of contrastive linguistics, this dissertation undertakes a contrastive study of cohesion of descriptive nature in English and Chinese as demonstrated in short stories. The cohesion theory by Halliday and Hasan is adopted as the underpinnings.While cohesion is universal as an important feature of discourse, the ways to realize cohesion are language-specific. Since the concept of cohesion was brought forth, scholars both home and abroad have done quantities of fruitful researches on it. These researches, however, are mainly ontological, whereas relevant studies in the domain of contrastive linguistics are not many. The latter, nonetheless, are meaningful both theoretically and practically. They not only provide insights into human languages and cast light on the influences of culture on language, but also build theoretical grounds for linguistic activities such as foreign language teaching.In view of the above, this dissertation makes an attempt to employ the theories and methodology of contrastive linguistics to take a contrastive study of cohesion in English and Chinese. Two corpora are built, an English corpus and a Chinese one, both consisting of 10 short stories by renowned contemporary native writers. A descriptive study incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methods is conducted on a number of tertium comparationis (TC) for the contrast and comparison of cohesive devices such as reference and ellipsis. The cohesive resource of reference is examined in particular. It is found that, as personal reference, English it carries a higher functional load and a larger semantic capacity than its Chinese counterpart ta. It also fulfills the function of extended reference. For demonstrative reference the dissertation makes an investigation on English this/that and Chinese zhe/na. The main difference is that the major function of this/that is extended reference, whereas Chinese zhe/na is cohesive mainly via identity of reference to the participants, as is termed in linguistics. The cohesion of ellipsis is usually anaphoric in both English and Chinese. In English almost all instances of ellipsis are immediate cohesion while in Chinese there are as many non-immediate cohesive resources as immediate ones. Ellipsis is mainly a phenomenon in spoken English whereas in either spoken or written Chinese there are many instances of ellipsis. Lexical cohesion in both languages reinforces the theme of discourse but it takes different forms in the two languages.Contrastive studies are still at the preliminary stage at present. Conducted within the domain of contrastive linguistics, this study analyzes the similarities and differences in cohesive devices manifested in English and Chinese short novels. Hopefully it can provide translation studies and language teaching as well as contrastive linguistics with valuable information.