A Study On Grammatical Cohesive Devices In Andersen’s Fairy Tales

Cohesion is an important concept in discourse linguistics. It carries great weight in discourse analysis. The book Cohesion in English(1976) Halliday co-authored with Hasan marks the birth of cohesion theory. In this book, they categorize cohesion into lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion. Fairy tales, as an important part of children literature, play an important role in children’s growth. Andersen’s fairy tales are of the classic work. They are characterized by rich content, broad genres and may be called the representative of fairy tales. So far, they have been translated into over 125 languages. Of all the various versions, the most authoritative English version must be The Complete Andersen’s Fairy Tales translated by the Danish-American actor Jean Hersholt. There are lots of studies on Andersen’s fairy tales. Most of them focus on children’s moral education, literature interpretation, psychology, stylistics and appraisal theory and so on. There is few research on Andersen’s fairy tales from the perspective of cohesion. Seldom research is conducted by combining grammatical cohesion with Andersen’s fairy tales.This study is based on grammatical cohesion put forward by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. 15 pieces of Andersen’s fairy tales used as corpus are chosen randomly from The Complete Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Qualitative approach is adopted. This thesis is intended to study the grammatical cohesive devices used in Andersen’s fairy tales, detail the grammatical cohesive devices used in Andersen’s fairy tales and their function, discuss their distribution and explore the reasons for their distribution.The research findings show that all the four grammatical cohesive devices have occurrence in Andersen’s fairy tales, yet with uneven occurrences. Reference holds the most common occurrence, with 63.88%. It is followed by conjunction(33.23%). Both substitution(1.54%) and ellipsis(1.35%) have rare occurrences. The large amount of reference in Andersen’s fairy tales can avoid the unnecessary repetition. Of the three types of reference, personal reference has the most frequent reference, amounting to 46.75%. Under the heading of personal reference, the percentage of the third person reference is the highest. The reasons can be attributed to two points: Andersen’s fairy tales are narrated from the perspective of the third person and everything is animated in children’s cognitive world. Of the four grammatical cohesive devices, the words expressing conjunction in Andersen’s fairy tales are onefold. Additive conjunction is of the most frequent occurrence, mainly realized by the conjunctive “and”. Adversative conjunction is of the second, mainly fulfilled by the conjunctive “but”. Causal conjunction and temporal conjunction are mainly realized by the conjunctives “so” and “then” respectively. Children have limited ability of first language acquisition and these conjunctives have common occurrences in daily oral English. So the use of these simple words can help them enhance the comprehension of the plot. It is also found that among the four grammatical cohesive devices, both substitution and ellipsis share rare occurrence, which can cater for children, the special readership, for they have low cognition, comprehension and small vocabulary. The overuse of substitution and ellipsis will have a severe impact on their reading.This study also shows that the grammatical cohesive devices used in Andersen’s fairy tales go with children’s language ability and cognition, and are easy for children to understand and accept. Meanwhile, it helps readers better comprehend and appreciate Andersen’s fairy tales, and enlightens readers to master cohesion in reading Andersen’s fairy tales. There are many wonderful fairy tales in China. It is hoped that this study can provide some reference point in translating Chinese fairy tales into English, then helping Chinese fairy tales be familiar to foreign readers.