A Study Of The Cohesive Devices Of The Articles In Harvard Business Review

Since Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory was first brought up, a great numberof scholars both abroad and at home have applied it to various texts, while few of themhave studied the cohesion in business review texts. As a new type of texts, businessreview is to broadcast business information and modern management experience andconcept. Harvard Business Review has been greatly welcomed in the whole world andthrown positive influence on Chinese readers since the day it was first published.Hence, the writing of business review will directly influence the transmission ofmanagement experience and concept, and further influence the development ofeconomy.This thesis carries a study on cohesive devices in English business reviewsthrough qualitative and quantitative analysis on the basis of Halliday and Hasan’scohesion theory. Firstly, the number and frequency of each cohesive device used in thesamples are calculated, and then examples are presented to illustrate the uses of eachcohesive device, followed by the exploration of the reasons behind it.To conduct a statistical analysis of the cohesive devices employed in Englishbusiness review, an English business review corpus is designed and built. And all the30pieces of English business review in the corpus are taken from the SPOTLIGHTsection of Harvard Business Review which are issued from May2011to August2012,consisting of114,240words all together.Based on the analysis, the study finds out that there are a bunch of cohesivedevices used in English business reviews. Lexical cohesion is used more frequentlythan grammatical cohesion with a percentage of61.2. Within grammatical cohesion,reference and conjunction are more frequently used than substitution and ellipsis.Within lexical cohesion, the uses of repetition and collocation outnumber othersgreatly. Personal reference and demonstrative reference are more favored thancomparative reference, while additive conjunction and adversative conjunction aremore favored than temporal conjunction and causal conjunction.This thesis contributes to the writing of business review through the analysis ofcohesive features of it, then makes the business information better absorbed andthrows positive influence on the transmission of management concept.